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Item:283292161390DESCRIPTION : Up for sale is a very cute MOSAIC ART PIECE which depicts a typical image of a JEWISH PEDDLER . The JEWISH MOSAIC ART PIECE is laid inside a metal frame on a solid wooden base. The piece is SIGNED but I'm unable to identify the MOSAIC ARTIST. The metal frame includes a hanger. Around 7.5" x 10" x 1" . Very good condition. ( Pls look at scan for accurate AS IS images ) . The MOSAIC ART PIECE will be sent in a special protective rigid sealed packaging. PAYMENTS : Payment methods accepted : Paypal. SHIPPMENT : Shipp worldwide via registered airmail is $17 . Will be sent in a special protective rigid sealed packaging. Handling within 3-5 days after payment. Estimated Int'l duration around 14 days. MORE DETAILS : Door to Door: How Jewish Peddlers Changed the World, One Household at a Time "The peddler's wagon," drawn by C.G. Bush. Library of Congress. Between 1780 and 1920, around half the world’s Jews left their homes in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in search of new opportunities abroad. Of the millions who crossed oceans and borders, many aimed to try their luck as traveling salesmen in places like Scotland, Chile, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden, or the United States—from South Dakota to Mississippi. Outfitted with little more than a heavy pack and a few key phrases (“Would you like to look in my bag?”) in the local language, these peddlers knocked on doors and sold sundries to whoever answered. NYU historian Hasia Diner chronicles their bold journeys in her new book Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, a comprehensive study of a profession that, though exhausting and unglamorous, had the potential to catapult immigrant families into the middle class in just a generation or two. Many peddlers saved enough to become shopkeepers; a few—like Levi Strauss (of denim fame) or Henry Lehman (co-founder of the now defunct Lehman Brothers financial services firm)— became titans of industry. But it was not without sacrifice: Peddling was physically demanding and often cripplingly lonely work. It meant walking long distances in all weather, lugging a sack that could weigh more than a hundred pounds. (Diner quotes one peddler who quipped of his route in north Florida and southern Georgia: “In the summer, the trips were hot, monotonous, dusty, and slow; in the winter, they were cold, monotonous, dusty, and slow.”) Because they carried cash, peddlers were easy marks for robbers; some were even murdered. Others, Diner reports, committed suicide—overburdened and undone, perhaps, by solitary life on the road. Those who (by luck or perseverance) escaped such disasters found success by filling an economic niche at a time when, in the wake of the industrial revolution, even families of modest means were developing a taste for cosmopolitan consumption. And as settlement expanded during the same period, people moving to the frontier came to depend on peddlers for creature comforts. Diner writes: “Probably no one would have moved to Oregon or Nebraska, British Columbia or Manitoba, in their frontier days had they not believed that they would shortly have pots and pans, dishes and silverware, tablecloths and eyeglasses, and the other accoutrements of the settled lives they had left.” Catering to an almost entirely female customer base—wives presented with the novel opportunity to make purchasing decisions without their husbands present—peddlers spent the Sabbath at their new home in a central town or city and the rest of the week on the road. They often depended on rural customers—many of whom had never met a Jewish person before—for overnight hospitality, a surprisingly intimate arrangement that quietly fostered a kind of impromptu cultural exchange: “The history of new-world Jewish peddling reveals that despite differences in class, race, ethnicity, religion, and language,” Diner writes, “Jews and their customers changed each other’s lives.” NYU Stories recently sat down to talk with Diner about peddling and its cultural and economic legacies—both here in the United States and around the world. —Eileen Reynolds What drove so many 19th-century Jews to try their luck in unknown lands? Anti-Semitism? Economic opportunity? Something else? The idea that Jewish migration was completely a response to anti-Semitism and horrors of one kind or another is very deeply rooted in communal memory, and has also been replicated to a certain degree in much historical scholarship. I’m not dismissing the fact that Jews were limited in the non-Jewish societies where they lived, but I want to make clear that there were certainly other factors: Like many of their non-Jewish neighbors, they were responding to vast changes in the economy where they lived—changes that made the occupations of their parents obsolete. They kind of had no choice but to go, so the question was where? The positive draw of the United States, mostly, and other places as well, was that there were consumers there who had cash, who were living above the subsistence level and wanted to use that money to get better things in life. Peddlers heard by word of mouth from relatives who’d already gone to South Africa or Australia or Mississippi or Ireland saying, “It’s not great, it’s really hard work, but if you’re willing to come and take on this pretty unpleasant occupation, it’ll pay off.” It was very common for immigrants who went first to send back money to pay for steamship tickets for brothers, sisters, cousins. And although Jews made up just a tiny fraction of the population in these new places, they chose places where there were no laws to bar them. They could come to Mississippi or upstate New York and while they were clearly marked as being odd and different, there were no laws that in any way impeded [them]. As outsiders, how did peddlers cultivate a customer base that trusted them? Wholesalers dictated that peddlers didn’t compete with each other, so each had his own territory. And they sold on the installment plan, so once they made a sale they had reason to go back to the same house and, after getting payment for what was owed, open their bags and say, “Oh, by the way, this week I have...” Those nights of the week when they were not near a hub of Jewish life they’d ask, “May I lodge here for the evening?”—that’d be the question for the last person they visited at the end of the day. And then when they’re sleeping in customers’ homes, that opens up all this non-work time for communication, small talk, and even religious exchange. In Protestant societies like South Africa and the American South, where people typically read the Bible together before going to sleep, a customer might even say to the peddler, “Well, you’re one of the Hebrews—would you like to read the Bible for us?” On one level that seems odd, but on another you can think of it as one of the earliest forms of ecumenical interfaith exchange—and it just took place home by home in a very organic and unplanned kind of way. That intimacy, and the peculiarities of peddling as an occupation, became really important in shaping Jewish integration into the new world. Jews became something other than “Christ killers” or mythical creatures from the bible. To many families, the Jewish peddler was just an ordinary guy who came once a week and talked about his kids or the weather or the news. You suggest that that kind of religious exchange helped spark the development of Reform Judaism in America. How so? Let’s say that on Monday night a peddler stays in the home of someone who’s Presbyterian, the next night someone who’s Methodist, and the next night someone who belongs in some kind of nondenominational evangelical church. They saw this in America because this is the one place they went to that didn't have a state religion, and which was the most religiously diverse, and where people of different Christian denominations lived in close proximity to each other and didn't kill each other over it. So I think it really opened up for them the idea that Judaism, too, needn’t be a closed, hermetically sealed world. They too started to think about creating new practices and institutions that fit their needs and their place in a new American reality. Library of Congress. Why were peddlers’ wares so coveted? In places like Cuba and the Caribbean, where they sold primarily to planation workers—so really poor people who have so few rights in society—they sold neckties and cloth handkerchiefs! There were real marks of important social status, and you can picture the wife buying it and thinking, “Okay, when my husband goes to town, I want him to look not like a degraded peasant but just as good as the boss.” These are small forms of consumption but within each one of them is a universe of customers saying, like in that old L’Oreal ad, “I’m worth it.” I was moved by the memoir I read by a man who’d go on to become the president of Colombia: He said that in his village no peasant had ever had a pair of shoes until a Jewish peddler brought them. Others sold things like eyeglasses, or carried photographic equipment to take pictures of families. This was a kind of revelation, the idea of having a picture of yourself to put up on the wall, where there used to be only a picture of, say, Jesus. Each one these is a tiny detail, but put together they point to the emergence of a whole new modern world for the consumers. Was it transgressing those class lines that sometimes got peddlers into trouble with anti-Semitic locals? Well, that and selling goods for less than the local shops. It was usually shopkeepers who spearheaded anti-peddler action, so I’m hesitant to even call it anti-Semitism. In some of these anti-peddler campaigns, like in Ireland or Quebec, interestingly both Catholic countries where there was a disdain for consumerism and modernity, I think the economic fear of peddler undercutting the local agents came first, and then anti-Jewish arguments were marshaled as part of it. But economic concerns were very much the opening wedge in these anti-peddler activities. In a lot of places there were non-Jewish peddlers who were no more loved by local authorities and local businesses than the Jews were—it’s just that there wasn’t the same readymade argument to use against them. How did peddlers navigate racial divisions in a place like the American South? It’s important to note that in America (and in places like South Africa and the Caribbean) Jews were always defined by law as white. They always had the same legal rights as white people and were recognized as such, even if there were people who didn’t like them and engaged in ethnic stereotypes. And as white people they had a range of privileges—they could walk on the road and nobody wanted to see their papers or ask where they were going. At the same time, they were forced, by the dictates of the market, to treat their African American customers just like they treated their white customers. So at a time when, in a place like Helena, Arkansas, a black person wasn’t allowed to try on clothes in a store, and had to get off the sidewalk to let a white person pass, the peddler comes into the house, takes of his hat, and bows to the African-American woman. He calls her “ma’am,” not “girl.” And she can slam the door in his face if she wants to! That really grabbed me. Any other white person who comes into her house—her husband’s boss, the landowner, law enforcement—she has to be deferential to. But the Jew comes in and has no power over her, so the tables are turned. He has to be deferential to her. That must have been an amazing revelation to African Americans, or Africans in South Africa, or Native Americans on reservations—to know that they didn’t have to always be treated the way they were in the larger sphere. Now the Jewish peddlers didn't do this because they believed in equal rights, of course. They weren’t closet civil rights activists—they did it to make a sale. Why did Jewish peddlers enjoy greater class mobility than other immigrant groups coming to the America at the same time? Jews (and Arabs, the other group that encountered the new world through peddling) were able to do this because they had internal networks of credit, and because they’d known peddling in the world. Everyone had an uncle, a father, or a neighbor who’d done it. And peddling, on the other hand, was one of the few positions that had within it the mechanism for saving. Say a peddler sold a tablecloth for a dollar. He pays the creditor (who bought it for 40 cents) 50 cents. That leaves 50 cents he can stash away to bring his family over, or invest in a horse and cart, or eventually open a store. Most other immigrants who came to the United States came to work in factories, on railroads, in textile mills, in logging camps, as hired hands on farms. If you were going to work at Carnegie Steel shoveling coal into the furnace at 18, you were probably going to be doing that until you died. What you earned was never going to give you the chance to save. There was much less mobility than American rhetoric tells us there was: It was much slower, it was torturous, it took many generations. Of course there were failures among peddlers too, but in the main most did pretty well—and none of their children became peddlers. ****** Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It is a technique of decorative art or interior decoration. Most mosaics are made of small, flat, roughly square, pieces of stone or glass of different colors, known as tesserae. Some, especially floor mosaics, are made of small rounded pieces of stone, and called "pebble mosaics". Others are made of other materials. Mosaic has a long history, starting in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC. Pebble mosaics were made in Tiryns inMycenean Greece; mosaics with patterns and pictures became widespread in classical times, both in Ancient Greece andAncient Rome. Early Christian basilicas from the 4th century onwards were decorated with wall and ceiling mosaics. Mosaic art flourished in the Byzantine Empire from the 6th to the 15th centuries; that tradition was adopted by the Norman kingdom in Sicily in the 12th century, by eastern-influenced Venice, and among the Rus in Ukraine. Mosaic fell out of fashion in the Renaissance, though artists like Raphael continued to practise the old technique. Roman and Byzantine influence led Jews to decorate 5th and 6th century synagogues in the Middle East with floor mosaics. Mosaic was widely used on religious buildings and palaces in early Islamic art, including Islam's first great religious building, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Mosaic went out of fashion in the Islamic world after the 8th century. Modern mosaics are made by professional artists, street artists, and as a popular craft. Many materials other than traditional stone and ceramic tesserae may be employed, including shells, glass and beads. Contents [hide] · 1History o 1.1Greek and Roman o 1.2Christian mosaic § 1.2.1Early Christian art § 1.2.2Ravenna § 1.2.3Butrint § 1.2.4Late Antique and Early Medieval Rome § 1.2.5Byzantine mosaics § 1.2.6Rome in the High Middle Ages § 1.2.7Sicily § 1.2.8Venice § 1.2.9Medieval Italy § 1.2.10Western and Central Europe § 1.2.11Renaissance and Baroque § 1.2.12The Christian East § 1.2.13Orthodox countries o 1.3Jewish mosaics o 1.4Middle Eastern and Western Asian art § 1.4.1Pre-Islamic Arabia § 1.4.2Pre-Islamic Persia § 1.4.3Islamic art § 1.4.3.1Arab · 2Modern mosaics o 2.1Mosaics as a popular craft o 2.2Mosaics in street art o 2.3Calçada Portuguesa · 3Terminology · 4Three techniques o 4.1Direct method o 4.2Indirect method o 4.3Double indirect method · 5Mathematics · 6Digital imaging · 7Robotic manufacturing · 8See also · 9Notes · 10References · 11External links History[edit] Ancient Greek mosaic of a deer hunt, in the House of the Abduction of Helen at Pella, late 4th century BC The earliest known examples of mosaics made of different materials were found at a temple building in Abra, Mesopotamia, and are dated to the second half of 3rd millennium BC. They consist of pieces of colored stones, shells and ivory. Excavations at Susa and Chogha Zanbil show evidence of the first glazed tiles, dating from around 1500 BC.[1] However, mosaic patterns were not used until the times of Sassanid Empire and Roman influence. Greek and Roman[edit] Bronze age pebble mosaics have been found at Tiryns;[2] mosaics of the 4th century BC are found in the Macedonian palace-city of Aegae, and the 4th-century BC mosaic of The Beauty of Durrës discovered in Durrës, Albania in 1916, is an early figural example; the Greek figural style was mostly formed in the 3rd century BC. Mythological subjects, or scenes of hunting or other pursuits of the wealthy, were popular as the centrepieces of a larger geometric design, with strongly emphasized borders.[3] Pliny the Elder mentions the artist Sosus of Pergamon by name, describing his mosaics of the food left on a floor after a feast and of a group of doves drinking from a bowl.[4] Both of these themes were widely copied.[5] Greek figural mosaics could have been copied or adapted paintings, a far more prestigious artform, and the style was enthusiastically adopted by the Romans so that large floor mosaics enriched the floors of Hellenistic villas and Romandwellings from Britain to Dura-Europos. Most recorded names of Roman mosaic workers are Greek, suggesting they dominated high quality work across the empire; no doubt most ordinary craftsmen were slaves. Splendid mosaic floors are found in Roman villas across North Africa, in places such as Carthage, and can still be seen in the extensive collection in Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. There were two main techniques in Greco-Roman mosaic: opus vermiculatum used tiny tesserae, typically cubes of 4 millimeters or less, and was produced in workshops in relatively small panels which were transported to the site glued to some temporary support. The tiny tesserae allowed very fine detail, and an approach to the illusionism of painting. Often small panels called emblemata were inserted into walls or as the highlights of larger floor-mosaics in coarser work. The normal technique was opus tessellatum, using larger tesserae, which was laid on site.[6] There was a distinct native Italian style using black on a white background, which was no doubt cheaper than fully coloured work.[7] In Rome, Nero and his architects used mosaics to cover some surfaces of walls and ceilings in the Domus Aurea, built 64 AD, and wall mosaics are also found atPompeii and neighbouring sites. However it seems that it was not until the Christian era that figural wall mosaics became a major form of artistic expression. The Roman church of Santa Costanza, which served as a mausoleum for one or more of the Imperial family, has both religious mosaic and decorative secular ceiling mosaics on a round vault, which probably represent the style of contemporary palace decoration. The mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale near Piazza Armerina in Sicily are the largest collection of late Roman mosaics in situ in the world, and are protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The large villa rustica, which was probably owned by Emperor Maximian, was built largely in the early 4th century. The mosaics were covered and protected for 700 years by a landslide that occurred in the 12th Century. The most important pieces are the Circus Scene, the 64m long Great Hunting Scene, the Little Hunt, the Labours of Hercules and the famous Bikini Girls, showing women undertaking a range of sporting activities in garments that resemble 20th Century bikinis. The peristyle, the imperial apartments and the thermae were also decorated with ornamental and mythological mosaics.[8] Other important examples of Roman mosaic art in Sicily were unearthed on the Piazza Vittoria in Palermo where two houses were discovered. The most important scenes there depictedOrpheus, Alexander the Great's Hunt and the Four Seasons. In 1913 the Zliten mosaic, a Roman mosaic famous for its many scenes from gladiatorial contests, hunting and everyday life, was discovered in the Libyan town ofZliten. In 2000 archaeologists working in Leptis Magna, Libya, uncovered a 30 ft length of five colorful mosaics created during the 1st or 2nd century AD. The mosaics show a warrior in combat with a deer, four young men wrestling a wild bull to the ground, and a gladiator resting in a state of fatigue, staring at his slain opponent. The mosaics decorated the walls of a cold plunge pool in a bath house within a Roman villa. The gladiator mosaic is noted by scholars as one of the finest examples of mosaic art ever seen — a "masterpiece comparable in quality with the Alexander Mosaic in Pompeii." A specific genre of Roman mosaic was called asaroton (Greek for "unswept floor"). It depicted in trompe l'oeil style the feast leftovers on the floors of wealthy houses.[9] · Roman mosaic ofUlysses, from Carthage. Now in the Bardo Museum, Tunisia · Cave canem mosaics ('Beware of the dog') were a popular motif for the thresholds of Romanvillas · A small part of The Great Pavement, a Roman mosaic laid in AD 325 atWoodchester,Gloucestershire, England · The mosaic of The Beauty of Durrës, late 4th century BC. Now in the National Historical Museum in Tirana · Roman mosaic found atCalleva Atrebatum(Silchester) · Aztec skull mask with mosaic decoration · Mosaic of female athletes playing ball at the Villa Romana del Casale of Piazza Armerina · Late Roman mosaics at Villa Romana La Olmeda, Spain) Christian mosaic[edit] Early Christian art[edit] Main article: Late Antique and medieval mosaics in Italy With the building of Christian basilicas in the late 4th century, wall and ceiling mosaics were adopted for Christian uses. The earliest examples of Christian basilicas have not survived, but the mosaics of Santa Constanza and Santa Pudenziana, both from the 4th century, still exist. The winemaking putti in the ambulatory of Santa Constanza still follow the classical tradition in that they represent the feast of Bacchus, which symbolizes transformation or change, and are thus appropriate for a mausoleum, the original function of this building. In another great Constantinian basilica, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem the original mosaic floor with typical Roman geometric motifs is partially preserved. The so-called Tomb of the Julii, near the crypt beneath St Peter's Basilica, is a 4th-century vaulted tomb with wall and ceiling mosaics that are given Christian interpretations. The Rotunda of Galerius in Thessaloniki, converted into a Christian church during the course of the 4th century, was embellished with very high artistic quality mosaics. Only fragments survive of the original decoration, especially a band depicting saints with hands raised in prayer, in front of complex architectural fantasies. In the following century Ravenna, the capital of the Western Roman Empire, became the center of late Roman mosaic art (see details in Ravenna section). Milan also served as the capital of the western empire in the 4th century. In the St Aquilinus Chapel of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, mosaics executed in the late 4th and early 5th centuries depict Christ with the Apostles and the Abduction of Elijah; these mosaics are outstanding for their bright colors, naturalism and adherence to the classical canons of order and proportion. The surviving apse mosaic of the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio, which shows Christ enthroned between Saint Gervasius and Saint Protasius and angels before a golden background date back to the 5th and to the 8th century, although it was restored many times later. The baptistery of the basilica, which was demolished in the 15th century, had a vault covered with gold-leaf tesserae, large quantities of which were found when the site was excavated. In the small shrine of San Vittore in ciel d'oro, now a chapel of Sant'Ambrogio, every surface is covered with mosaics from the second half of the 5th century. Saint Victor is depicted in the center of the golden dome, while figures of saints are shown on the walls before a blue background. The low spandrels give space for the symbols of the four Evangelists. Albingaunum was the main Roman port of Liguria. The octagonal baptistery of the town was decorated in the 5th century with high quality blue and white mosaics representing the Apostles. The surviving remains are somewhat fragmented. A mosaic pavement depicting humans, animals and plants from the original 4th-century cathedral of Aquileia has survived in the later medieval church. This mosaic adopts pagan motifs such as the Nilotic scene, but behind the traditional naturalistic content is Christian symbolism such as the ichthys. The 6th-century early Christian basilicas of Sant' Eufemia it:Basilica di Sant'Eufemia (Grado) and Santa Maria delle Grazie in Grado also have mosaic floors.[10] Ravenna[edit] The Good Shepherd mosaic in theMausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna In the 5th-century Ravenna, the capital of the Western Roman Empire, became the center of late Roman mosaic art. TheMausoleum of Galla Placidia was decorated with mosaics of high artistic quality in 425–430. The vaults of the small, cross-shaped structure are clad with mosaics on blue background. The central motif above the crossing is a golden cross in the middle of the starry sky. Another great building established by Galla Placidia was the church of San Giovanni Evangelista. She erected it in fulfillment of a vow that she made having escaped from a deadly storm in 425 on the sea voyage from Constantinople to Ravenna. The mosaics depicted the storm, portraits of members of the western and eastern imperial family and the bishop of Ravenna, Peter Chrysologus. They are known only from Renaissance sources because almost all were destroyed in 1747.[11] Ostrogoths kept alive the tradition in the 6th century, as the mosaics of the Arian Baptistry, Baptistry of Neon, Archbishop's Chapel, and the earlier phase mosaics in the Basilica of San Vitale and Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo testify. After 539 Ravenna was reconquered by the Romans in the form of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) and became the seat of the Exarchate of Ravenna. The greatest development of Christian mosaics unfolded in the second half of the 6th century. Outstanding examples of Byzantine mosaic art are the later phase mosaics in the Basilica of San Vitale and Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. The mosaic depicting Emperor Saint Justinian I and Empress Theodora in the Basilica of San Vitale were executed shortly after the Byzantine conquest. The mosaics of the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe were made around 549. The anti-Arian theme is obvious in the apse mosaic of San Michele in Affricisco, executed in 545–547 (largely destroyed; the remains in Berlin). The last example of Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna was commissioned by bishop Reparatus between 673–79 in the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe. The mosaic panel in the apse showing the bishop with Emperor Constantine IV is obviously an imitation of the Justinian panel in San Vitale. Butrint[edit] The mosaic pavement of the Vrina Plain basilica of Butrint, Albania appear to pre-date that of the Baptistery by almost a generation, dating to the last quarter of the 5th or the first years of the 6th century. The mosaic displays a variety of motifs including sea-creatures, birds, terrestrial beasts, fruits, flowers, trees and abstracts – designed to depict a terrestrial paradise of God’s creation. Superimposed on this scheme are two large tablets, tabulae ansatae, carrying inscriptions. A variety of fish, a crab, a lobster, shrimps, mushrooms, flowers, a stag and two cruciform designs surround the smaller of the two inscriptions, which reads: In fulfilment of the vow (prayer) of those whose names God knows. This anonymous dedicatory inscription is a public demonstration of the benefactors’ humility and an acknowledgement of God’s omniscience. The abundant variety of natural life depicted in the Butrint mosaics celebrates the richness of God’s creation; some elements also have specific connotations. Thekantharos vase and vine refer to the eucharist, the symbol of the sacrifice of Christ leading to salvation. Peacocks are symbols of paradise and resurrection; shown eating or drinking from the vase they indicate the route to eternal life. Deer or stags were commonly used as images of the faithful aspiring to Christ: "As a heart desireth the water brook, so my souls longs for thee, O God." Water-birds and fish and other sea-creatures can indicate baptism as well as the members of the Church who are christened. Late Antique and Early Medieval Rome[edit] See also: Late Antique and medieval mosaics in Italy 5th century mosaic in the triumphal arch of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome Christian mosaic art also flourished in Rome, gradually declining as conditions became more difficult in the Early Middle Ages. 5th century mosaics can be found over the triumphal arch and in the nave of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. The 27 surviving panels of the nave are the most important mosaic cycle in Rome of this period. Two other important 5th century mosaics are lost but we know them from 17th-century drawings. In the apse mosaic of Sant'Agata dei Goti (462–472, destroyed in 1589) Christ was seated on a globe with the twelve Apostles flanking him, six on either side. At Sant'Andrea in Catabarbara (468–483, destroyed in 1686) Christ appeared in the center, flanked on either side by three Apostles. Four streams flowed from the little mountain supporting Christ. The original 5th-century apse mosaic of the Santa Sabina was replaced by a very similar fresco by Taddeo Zuccari in 1559. The composition probably remained unchanged: Christ flanked by male and female saints, seated on a hill while lambs drinking from a stream at its feet. All three mosaics had a similar iconography. 6th-century pieces are rare in Rome but the mosaics inside the triumphal arch of the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le murabelong to this era. The Chapel of Ss. Primo e Feliciano in Santo Stefano Rotondo has very interesting and rare mosaics from the 7th century. This chapel was built by Pope Theodore I as a family burial place. In the 7th–9th centuries Rome fell under the influence of Byzantine art, noticeable on the mosaics of Santa Prassede, Santa Maria in Domnica, Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Santi Nereo e Achilleo and the San Venanzio chapel of San Giovanni in Laterano. The great dining hall of Pope Leo III in theLateran Palace was also decorated with mosaics. They were all destroyed later except for one example, the so-called Triclinio Leoniano of which a copy was made in the 18th century. Another great work of Pope Leo, the apse mosaic of Santa Susanna, depicted Christ with the Pope and Charlemagne on one side, and SS. Susanna and Felicity on the other. It was plastered over during a renovation in 1585. Pope Paschal I (817–824) embellished the church of Santo Stefano del Cacco with an apsidal mosaic which depicted the pope with a model of the church (destroyed in 1607). The fragment of an 8th-century mosaic, the Epiphany is one of the very rare remaining pieces of the medieval decoration of Old St. Peter's Basilica, demolished in the late 16th century. The precious fragment is kept in the sacristy of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. It proves the high artistic quality of the destroyed St. Peter's mosaics. Byzantine mosaics[edit] See also: Early Byzantine mosaics in the Middle East The so-called Gothic chieftain, from the Mosaic Peristyle of the Great Palace of Constantinople Saint Peter mosaic from the Chora Church Byzantine mosaic above the entrance portal of the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč, Croatia (6th century) Mosaics were more central to Byzantine culture than to that of Western Europe. Byzantine church interiors were generally covered with golden mosaics. Mosaic art flourished in the Byzantine Empire from the 6th to the 15th centuries. The majority of Byzantine mosaics were destroyed without trace during wars and conquests, but the surviving remains still form a fine collection.[12] The great buildings of Emperor Justinian like the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the Nea Church in Jerusalem and the rebuilt Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem were certainly embellished with mosaics but none of these survived. Important fragments survived from the mosaic floor of the Great Palace of Constantinople which was commissioned duringJustinian's reign. The figures, animals, plants all are entirely classical but they are scattered before a plain background. The portrait of a moustached man, probably a Gothic chieftain, is considered the most important surviving mosaic of the Justinianian age. The so-called small sekreton of the palace was built during Justin II's reign around 565–577. Some fragments survive from the mosaics of this vaulted room. The vine scroll motifs are very similar to those in the Santa Constanza and they still closely follow the Classical tradition. There are remains of floral decoration in the Church of the Acheiropoietos in Thessaloniki (5th–6th centuries). A pre-Iconoclasticdepiction of St. Demetrios at the Hagios Demetrios Basilica in Thessaloniki. In the 6th century, Ravenna, the capital of Byzantine Italy, became the center of mosaic making. Istria also boasts some important examples from this era. The Euphrasian Basilica in Parentium was built in the middle of the 6th century and decorated with mosaics depicting the Theotokos flanked by angels and saints. Fragments remain from the mosaics of the Church of Santa Maria Formosa in Pola. These pieces were made during the 6th century by artists from Constantinople. Their pure Byzantine style is different from the contemporary Ravennate mosaics. Very few early Byzantine mosaics survived the Iconoclastic destruction of the 8th century. Among the rare examples are the 6th-century Christ in majesty (or Ezekiel's Vision) mosaic in the apse of the Church of Hosios David in Thessaloniki that was hidden behind mortar during those dangerous times. Nine mosaic panels in the Hagios Demetrios Church, which were made between 634 and 730, also escaped destruction. Unusually almost all represent Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki, often with suppliants before him. In the Iconoclastic era, figural mosaics were also condemned as idolatry. The Iconoclastic churches were embellished with plain gold mosaics with only one great cross in the apse like the Hagia Irene in Constantinople (after 740). There were similar crosses in the apses of the Hagia Sophia Church in Thessaloniki and in the Church of the Dormition in Nicaea. The crosses were substituted with the image of the Theotokos in both churches after the victory of the Iconodules (787–797 and in 8th–9th centuries respectively, the Dormition church was totally destroyed in 1922). A similar Theotokos image flanked by two archangels were made for the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in 867. The dedication inscription says: "The images which the impostors had cast down here pious emperors have again set up." In the 870s the so-called large sekreton of the Great Palace of Constantinople was decorated with the images of the four great iconodule patriarchs. The post-Iconoclastic era was the heyday of Byzantine art with the most beautiful mosaics executed. The mosaics of the Macedonian Renaissance (867–1056) carefully mingled traditionalism with innovation. Constantinopolitan mosaics of this age followed the decoration scheme first used in Emperor Basil I's Nea Ekklesia. Not only this prototype was later totally destroyed but each surviving composition is battered so it is necessary to move from church to church to reconstruct the system. An interesting set of Macedonian-era mosaics make up the decoration of the Hosios Loukas Monastery. In the narthex there is the Crucifixion, the Pantokrator and the Anastasis above the doors, while in the church the Theotokos (apse), Pentecost, scenes from Christ's life and ermit St Loukas (all executed before 1048). The scenes are treated with a minimum of detail and the panels are dominated with the gold setting. Detail of mosaic from Nea Moni Monastery The Nea Moni Monastery on Chios was established by Constantine Monomachos in 1043–1056. The exceptional mosaic decoration of the dome showing probably the nine orders of the angels was destroyed in 1822 but other panels survived (Theotokos with raised hands, four evangelists with seraphim, scenes from Christ's life and an interesting Anastasis where King Salomon bears resemblance to Constantine Monomachos). In comparison with Osios Loukas Nea Moni mosaics contain more figures, detail, landscape and setting. Another great undertaking by Constantine Monomachos was the restoration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalembetween 1042 and 1048. Nothing survived of the mosaics which covered the walls and the dome of the edifice but the Russian abbot Daniel, who visited Jerusalem in 1106–1107 left a description: "Lively mosaics of the holy prophets are under the ceiling, over the tribune. The altar is surmounted by a mosaic image of Christ. In the main altar one can see the mosaic of the Exhaltation of Adam. In the apse the Ascension of Christ. The Annunciation occupies the two pillars next to the altar."[13] The Daphni Monastery houses the best preserved complex of mosaics from the early Comnenan period (ca. 1100) when the austere and hieratic manner typical for the Macedonian epoch and represented by the awesome Christ Pantocrator image inside the dome, was metamorphosing into a more intimate and delicate style, of which The Angel before St Joachim — with its pastoral backdrop, harmonious gestures and pensive lyricism — is considered a superb example. The 9th- and 10th-century mosaics of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople are truly classical Byzantine artworks. The north and south tympana beneath the dome was decorated with figures of prophets, saints and patriarchs. Above the principal door from the narthex we can see an Emperor kneeling before Christ (late 9th or early 10th century). Above the door from the southwest vestibule to the narthex another mosaic shows the Theotokos with Justinian and Constantine. Justinian I is offering the model of the church to Mary while Constantine is holding a model of the city in his hand. Both emperors are beardless – this is an example for conscious archaization as contemporary Byzantine rulers were bearded. A mosaic panel on the gallery shows Christ with Constantine Monomachos and Empress Zoe (1042–1055). The emperor gives a bulging money sack to Christ as a donation for the church. The dome of the Hagia Sophia Church in Thessaloniki is decorated with an Ascension mosaic (c. 885). The composition resembles the great baptistries in Ravenna, with apostles standing between palms and Christ in the middle. The scheme is somewhat unusual as the standard post-Iconoclastic formula for domes contained only the image of the Pantokrator. Mosaic of Christ Pantocrator from Hagia Sophia from the Deesismosaic. There are very few existing mosaics from the Komnenian period but this paucity must be due to accidents of survival and gives a misleading impression. The only surviving 12th-century mosaic work in Constantinople is a panel in Hagia Sophia depicting EmperorJohn II and Empress Eirene with the Theotokos (1122–34). The empress with her long braided hair and rosy cheeks is especially capturing. It must be a lifelike portrayal because Eirene was really a redhead as her original Hungarian name, Piroska shows. The adjacent portrait of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos on a pier (from 1122) is similarly personal. The imperial mausoleum of theKomnenos dynasty, the Pantokrator Monastery was certainly decorated with great mosaics but these were later destroyed. The lack of Komnenian mosaics outside the capital is even more apparent. There is only a "Communion of the Apostles" in the apse of the cathedral of Serres. A striking technical innovation of the Komnenian period was the production of very precious, miniature mosaic icons. In these icons the small tesserae (with sides of 1 mm or less) were set on wax or resin on a wooden panel. These products of extraordinary craftmanship were intended for private devotion. The Louvre Transfiguration is a very fine example from the late 12th century. The miniature mosaic of Christ in the Museo Nazionale at Florence illustrates the more gentle, humanistic conception of Christ which appeared in the 12th century. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 caused the decline of mosaic art for the next five decades. After the reconquest of the city byMichael VIII Palaiologos in 1261 the Hagia Sophia was restored and a beautiful new Deesis was made on the south gallery. This huge mosaic panel with figures two and a half times lifesize is really overwhelming due to its grand scale and superlative craftsmanship. The Hagia Sophia Deesis is probably the most famous Byzantine mosaic in Constantinople. The Pammakaristos Monastery was restored by Michael Glabas, an imperial official, in the late 13th century. Only the mosaic decoration of the small burial chapel (parekklesion) of Glabas survived. This domed chapel was built by his widow, Martha around 1304–08. In the miniature dome the traditional Pantokrator can be seen with twelve prophets beneath. Unusually the apse is decorated with a Deesis, probably due to the funerary function of the chapel. The Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki was built in 1310–14. Although some vandal systematically removed the gold tesserae of the background it can be seen that the Pantokrator and the prophets in the dome follow the traditional Byzantine pattern. Many details are similar to the Pammakaristos mosaics so it is supposed that the same team of mosaicists worked in both buildings. Another building with a related mosaic decoration is the Theotokos Paregoritissa Church in Arta. The church was established by the Despot of Epirus in 1294–96. In the dome is the traditional stern Pantokrator, with prophets and cherubim below. Mosaic of Theodore Metochites offering the Chora Church to Christ The greatest mosaic work of the Palaeologan renaissance in art is the decoration of the Chora Church in Constantinople. Although the mosaics of the naos have not survived except three panels, the decoration of the exonarthex and the esonarthex constitute the most important full-scale mosaic cycle in Constantinople after the Hagia Sophia. They were executed around 1320 by the command of Theodore Metochites. The esonarthex has two fluted domes, specially created to provide the ideal setting for the mosaic images of the ancestors of Christ. The southern one is called the Dome of the Pantokrator while the northern one is the Dome of the Theotokos. The most important panel of the esonarthex depicts Theodore Metochites wearing a huge turban, offering the model of the church to Christ. The walls of both narthexes are decorated with mosaic cycles from the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. These panels show the influence of the Italian trecento on Byzantine art especially the more natural settings, landscapes, figures. The last Byzantine mosaic work was created for the Hagia Sophia, Constantinople in the middle of the 14th century. The great eastern arch of the cathedral collapsed in 1346, bringing down the third of the main dome. By 1355 not only the big Pantokrator image was restored but new mosaics were set on the eastern arch depicting the Theotokos, the Baptist and Emperor John V Palaiologos (discovered only in 1989). In addition to the large-scale monuments several miniature mosaic icons of outstanding quality was produced for the Palaiologos court and nobles. The loveliest examples from the 14th century are Annunciation in the Victoria and Albert Museum and a mosaic diptych in the Cathedral Treasury of Florence representing theTwelve Feasts of the Church. In the troubled years of the 15th century the fatally weakened empire could not afford luxurious mosaics. Churches were decorated with wall-paintings in this era and after the Turkish conquest. Rome in the High Middle Ages[edit] Apse mosaic in the Santa Maria Maggiore The last great period of Roman mosaic art was the 12th–13th century when Rome developed its own distinctive artistic style, free from the strict rules of eastern tradition and with a more realistic portrayal of figures in the space. Well-known works of this period are the floral mosaics of the Basilica di San Clemente, the façade of Santa Maria in Trastevere and San Paolo fuori le Mura. The beautiful apse mosaic of Santa Maria in Trastevere (1140) depicts Christ and Mary sitting next to each other on the heavenly throne, the first example of this iconographic scheme. A similar mosaic, the Coronation of the Virgin, decorates the apse of Santa Maria Maggiore. It is a work of Jacopo Torriti from 1295. The mosaics of Torriti and Jacopo da Camerino in the apse of San Giovanni in Laterano from 1288–94 were thoroughly restored in 1884. The apse mosaic of San Crisogono is attributed to Pietro Cavallini, the greatest Roman painter of the 13th century. Six scenes from the life of Mary in Santa Maria in Trastevere were also executed by Cavallini in 1290. These mosaics are praised for their realistic portrayal and attempts of perspective. There is an interesting mosaic medaillon from 1210 above the gate of the church of San Tommaso in Formis showing Christ enthroned between a white and a black slave. The church belonged to the Order of the Trinitarians which was devoted to ransoming Christian slaves. The great Navicella mosaic (1305–1313) in the atrium of the Old St. Peter's is attributed to Giotto di Bondone. The giant mosaic, commissioned by Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi, was originally situated on the eastern porch of the old basilica and occupied the whole wall above the entrance arcade facing the courtyard. It depicted St. Peter walking on the waters. This extraordinary work was mainly destroyed during the construction of the new St. Peter's in the 17th century. Navicella means "little ship" referring to the large boat which dominated the scene, and whose sail, filled by the storm, loomed over the horizon. Such a natural representation of a seascape was known only from ancient works of art. Sicily[edit] Saracen arches and Byzantine mosaics in theCappella Palatina of Roger II of Sicily The heyday of mosaic making in Sicily was the age of the independent Norman kingdom in the 12th century. The Norman kings adopted the Byzantine tradition of mosaic decoration to enhance the somewhat dubious legality of their rule. Greek masters working in Sicily developed their own style, that shows the influence of Western European and Islamic artistic tendencies. Best examples of Sicilian mosaic art are the Cappella Palatina of Roger II,[14] the Martorana church in Palermo and the cathedrals of Cefalù andMonreale. The Cappella Palatina clearly shows evidence for blending the eastern and western styles. The dome (1142–42) and the eastern end of the church (1143–1154) were decorated with typical Byzantine mosaics i.e. Pantokrator, angels, scenes from the life of Christ. Even the inscriptions are written in Greek. The narrative scenes of the nave (Old Testament, life of Sts Peter and Paul) are resembling to the mosaics of the Old St. Peter's and St. Paul's Basilica in Rome (Latin inscriptions, 1154–66). The Martorana church (decorated around 1143) looked originally even more Byzantine although important parts were later demolished. The dome mosaic is similar to that of the Cappella Palatina, with Christ enthroned in the middle and four bowed, elongated angels. The Greek inscriptions, decorative patterns, and evangelists in the squinches are obviously executed by the same Greek masters who worked on the Cappella Palatina. The mosaic depicting Roger II of Sicily, dressed in Byzantine imperial robes and receiving the crown by Christ, was originally in the demolished narthex together with another panel, the Theotokos with Georgios of Antiochia, the founder of the church. In Cefalù (1148) only the high, French Gothic presbytery was covered with mosaics: the Pantokrator on the semidome of the apse and cherubim on the vault. On the walls are Latin and Greek saints, with Greek inscriptions. Monreale mosaics: William II offering the Monreale Cathedral to the Virgin Mary The Monreale mosaics constitute the largest decoration of this kind in Italy, covering 0,75 hectares with at least 100 million glass and stone tesserae. This huge work was executed between 1176 and 1186 by the order of King William II of Sicily. The iconography of the mosaics in the presbytery is similar to Cefalu while the pictures in the nave are almost the same as the narrative scenes in the Cappella Palatina. The Martorana mosaic of Roger II blessed by Christ was repeated with the figure of King William II instead of his predecessor. Another panel shows the king offering the model of the cathedral to the Theotokos. The Cathedral of Palermo, rebuilt by Archbishop Walter in the same time (1172–85), was also decorated with mosaics but none of these survived except the 12th-century image of Madonna del Tocco above the western portal. The cathedral of Messina, consecrated in 1197, was also decorated with a great mosaic cycle, originally on par with Cefalù and Monreale, but heavily damaged and restored many times later. In the left apse of the same cathedral 14th-century mosaics survived, representing the Madonna and Child between Saints Agata and Lucy, the Archangels Gabriel and Michael and Queens Eleonora and Elisabetta. Southern Italy was also part of the Norman kingdom but great mosaics did not survive in this area except the fine mosaic pavement of the Otranto Cathedral from 1166, with mosaics tied into a tree of life, mostly still preserved. The scenes depict biblical characters, warrior kings, medieval beasts, allegories of the months and working activity. Only fragments survived from the original mosaic decoration of Amalfi's Norman Cathedral. The mosaic ambos in the churches of Ravello prove that mosaic art was widespread in Southern Italy during the 11th–13th centuries. The palaces of the Norman kings were decorated with mosaics depicting animals and landscapes. The secular mosaics are seemingly more Eastern in character than the great religious cycles and show a strong Persian influence. The most notable examples are the Sala di Ruggero in the Palazzo dei Normanni, Palermo and theSala della Fontana in the Zisa summer palace, both from the 12th century. Venice[edit] In parts of Italy, which were under eastern artistic influences, like Sicily and Venice, mosaic making never went out of fashion in the Middle Ages. The whole interior of the St Mark's Basilica in Venice is clad with elaborate, golden mosaics. The oldest scenes were executed by Greek masters in the late 11th century but the majority of the mosaics are works of local artists from the 12th–13th centuries. The decoration of the church was finished only in the 16th century. One hundred and ten scenes of mosaics in the atrium of St Mark's were based directly on the miniatures of the Cotton Genesis, a Byzantine manuscript that was brought to Venice after the sack of Constantinople (1204). The mosaics were executed in the 1220s. Other important Venetian mosaics can be found in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello from the 12th century, and in the Basilical of Santi Maria e Donato in Murano with a restored apse mosaic from the 12th century and a beautiful mosaic pavement (1140). The apse of the San Cipriano Church in Murano was decorated with an impressive golden mosaic from the early 13th century showing Christ enthroned with Mary, St John and the two patron saints, Cipriano and Cipriana. When the church was demolished in the 19th century, the mosaic was bought by Frederick William IV of Prussia. It was reassembled in the Friedenskircheof Potsdam in the 1840s. Trieste was also an important center of mosaic art. The mosaics in the apse of the Cathedral of San Giusto were laid by master craftsmen from Veneto in the 12th–13th centuries. Medieval Italy[edit] The monastery of Grottaferrata founded by Greek Basilian monks and consecrated by the Pope in 1024 was decorated with Italo-Byzantine mosaics, some of which survived in the narthex and the interior. The mosaics on the triumphal arch portray the Twelve Apostles sitting beside an empty throne, evoking Christ's ascent to Heaven. It is a Byzantine work of the 12th century. There is a beautiful 11th-century Deesis above the main portal. The Abbot of Monte Cassino, Desiderius sent envoys to Constantinople some time after 1066 to hire expert Byzantine mosaicists for the decoration of the rebuilt abbey church. According to chronicler Leo of Ostia the Greek artists decorated the apse, the arch and the vestibule of the basilica. Their work was admired by contemporaries but was totally destroyed in later centuries except two fragments depicting greyhounds (now in the Monte Cassino Museum). "The abbot in his wisdom decided that great number of young monks in the monastery should be thoroughly initiated in these arts" – says the chronicler about the role of the Greeks in the revival of mosaic art in medieval Italy. Florence Baptistry In Florence a magnificiant mosaic of the Last Judgement decorates the dome of the Baptistery. The earliest mosaics, works of art of many unknown Venetian craftsmen (including probably Cimabue), date from 1225. The covering of the ceiling was probably not completed until the 14th century. The impressive mosaic of Christ in Majesty, flanked by the Blessed Virgin and St. John the Evangelist in the apse of thecathedral of Pisa was designed by Cimabue in 1302. It evokes the Monreale mosaics in style. It survived the great fire of 1595 which destroyed most of the mediveval interior decoration. Sometimes not only church interiors but façades were also decorated with mosaics in Italy like in the case of the St Mark's Basilica in Venice (mainly from the 17th–19th centuries, but the oldest one from 1270–75, "The burial of St Mark in the first basilica"), the Cathedral of Orvieto (golden Gothic mosaics from the 14th century, many times redone) and the Basilica di San Frediano in Lucca (huge, striking golden mosaic representing the Ascension of Christ with the apostles below, designed byBerlinghiero Berlinghieri in the 13th century). The Cathedral of Spoleto is also decorated on the upper façade with a huge mosaic portraying the Blessing Christ (signed by one Solsternus from 1207). Western and Central Europe[edit] A “painting” made from tesserae inSt Peter's Basilica, Vatican State, Italy Beyond the Alps the first important example of mosaic art was the decoration of the Palatine Chapel in Aachen, commissioned by Charlemagne. It was completely destroyed in a fire in 1650. A rare example of surviving Carolingian mosaics is the apse semi-dome decoration of the oratory of Germigny-des-Prés built in 805–806 by Theodulf, bishop of Orléans, a leading figure of the Carolingian renaissance. This unique work of art, rediscovered only in the 19th century, had no followers. Only scant remains prove that mosaics were still used in the Early Middle Ages. The Abbey of Saint-Martial in Limoges, originally an important place of pilgrimage, was totally demolished during the French Revolution except its crypt which was rediscovered in the 1960s. A mosaic panel was unearthed which was dated to the 9th century. It somewhat incongruously uses cubes of gilded glass and deep green marble, probably taken from antique pavements. This could also be the case with the early 9th century mosaic found under the Basilica of Saint-Quentin in Picardy, where antique motifs are copied but using only simple colors. The mosaics in the Cathedral of Saint-Jean at Lyon have been dated to the 11th century because they employ the same non-antique simple colors. More fragments were found on the site of Saint-Croix at Poitiers which might be from the 6th or 9th century. Close up of the bottom left corner of the picture above. Click the picture to see the individual tesserae Later fresco replaced the more labor-intensive technique of mosaic in Western-Europe, although mosaics were sometimes used as decoration on medieval cathedrals. The Royal Basilica of the Hungarian kings in Székesfehérvár (Alba Regia) had a mosaic decoration in the apse. It was probably a work of Venetian or Ravennese craftsmen, executed in the first decades of the 11th century. The mosaic was almost totally destroyed together with the basilica in the 17th century. The Golden Gate of the St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague got its name from the golden 14th-century mosaic of the Last Judgement above the portal. It was executed by Venetian craftsmen. Carolingian mosaic in Germigny-des-Prés The Crusaders in the Holy Land also adopted mosaic decoration under local Byzantine influence. During their 12th-century reconstruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem they complemented the existing Byzantine mosaics with new ones. Almost nothing of them survived except the "Ascension of Christ" in the Latin Chapel (now confusingly surrounded by many 20th-century mosaics). More substantial fragments were preserved from the 12th-century mosaic decoration of theChurch of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The mosaics in the nave are arranged in five horizontal bands with the figures of the ancestors of Christ, Councils of the Church and angels. In the apses the Annunciation, the Nativity, Adoration of the Magi and Dormition of the Blessed Virgin can be seen. The program of redecoration of the church was completed in 1169 as a unique collaboration of the Byzantine emperor, the king of Jerusalem and the Latin Church.[15] In 2003, the remains of a mosaic pavement were discovered under the ruins of the Bizere Monastery near the River Mureş in present-day Romania. The panels depict real or fantastic animal, floral, solar and geometric representations. Some archeologists supposed that it was the floor of an Orthodox church, built some time between the 10th and 11th century. Other experts claim that it was part of the later Catholic monastery on the site because it shows the signs of strong Italianate influence. The monastery was situated that time in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary. Renaissance and Baroque[edit] Although mosaics went out of fashion and were substituted by frescoes, some of the great Renaissance artists also worked with the old technique. Raphael's Creation of the World in the dome of the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo is a notable example that was executed by a Venetian craftsman, Luigi di Pace. During the papacy of Clement VIII (1592–1605), the “Congregazione della Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro" was established, providing an independent organisation charged with completing the decorations in the newly built St. Peter's Basilica. Instead of frescoes the cavernous Basilica was mainly decorated with mosaics. Among the explanations are: 1. The old St. Peter's Basilica had been decorated with mosaic, as was common in churches built during the early Christian era; the 17th century followed the tradition to enhance continuity. 2. In a church like this with high walls and few windows, mosaics were brighter and reflected more light. 3. Mosaics had greater intrinsic longevity than either frescoes or canvases. 4. Mosaics had an association with bejeweled decoration, flaunting richness. The mosaics of St. Peter's often show lively Baroque compositions based on designs or canvases from like Ciro Ferri, Guido Reni, Domenichino, Carlo Maratta, and many others. Raphael is represented by a mosaic replica of this last painting, the Transfiguration. Many different artists contributed to the 17th- and 18th-century mosaics in St. Peter's, including Giovanni Battista Calandra, Fabio Cristofari (died 1689), and Pietro Paolo Cristofari (died 1743).[16] Works of the Fabbrica were often used as papal gifts. The Christian East[edit] Main article: Early Byzantine mosaics in the Middle East Jerusalem on the Madaba Map The eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman and later the Byzantine Empires inherited a strong artistic tradition from the Late Antiquity. Similarly to Italy and Constantinople churches and important secular buildings in the region of Syria and Egypt were decorated with elaborate mosaic panels between the 5th and 8th centuries. The great majority of these works of art were later destroyed but archeological excavations unearthed many surviving examples. The single most important piece of Byzantine Christian mosaic art in the East is the Madaba Map, made between 542 and 570 as the floor of the church of Saint George at Madaba, Jordan. It was rediscovered in 1894. The Madaba Map is the oldest surviving cartographic depiction of the Holy Land. It depicts an area from Lebanon in the north to the Nile Delta in the south, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Eastern Desert. The largest and most detailed element of the topographic depiction is Jerusalem, at the center of the map. The map is enriched with many naturalistic features, like animals, fishing boats, bridges and palm trees One of the earliest examples of Byzantine mosaic art in the region can be found on Mount Nebo, an important place of pilgrimage in the Byzantine era where Mosesdied. Among the many 6th-century mosaics in the church complex (discovered after 1933) the most interesting one is located in the baptistery. The intact floor mosaic covers an area of 9 x 3 m and was laid down in 530. It depicts hunting and pastoral scenes with rich Middle Eastern flora and fauna. Mosaic floor from the church onMount Nebo (baptistery, 530) The Church of Sts. Lot and Procopius was founded in 567 in Nebo village under Mount Nebo (now Khirbet Mukhayyat). Its floor mosaic depicts everyday activities like grape harvest. Another two spectacular mosaics were discovered in the ruined Church of Preacher John nearby. One of the mosaics was placed above the other one which was completely covered and unknown until the modern restoration. The figures on the older mosaic have thus escaped the iconoclasts.[17] The town of Madaba remained an important center of mosaic making during the 5th–8th centuries. In the Church of the Apostles the middle of the main panel Thalassa, goddess of the sea, can be seen surrounded by fishes and other sea creatures. Native Middle Eastern birds, mammals, plants and fruits were also added.[18] The Transfiguration of Jesus in theSaint Catherine's Monastery Important Justinian era mosaics decorated the Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt. Generally wall mosaics have not survived in the region because of the destruction of buildings but the St. Catherine's Monastery is exceptional. On the upper wall Moses is shown in two panels on a landscape background. In the apse we can see the Transfiguration of Jesus on a golden background. The apse is surrounded with bands containing medallions of apostles and prophets, and two contemporary figure, "Abbot Longinos" and "John the Deacon". The mosaic was probably created in 565/6. Jerusalem with its many holy places probably had the highest concentration of mosaic-covered churches but very few of them survived the subsequent waves of destructions. The present remains do not do justice to the original richness of the city. The most important is the so-called "Armenian Mosaic" which was discovered in 1894 on the Street of the Prophets nearDamascus Gate. It depicts a vine with many branches and grape clusters, which springs from a vase. Populating the vine's branches are peacocks, ducks, storks, pigeons, an eagle, a partridge, and a parrot in a cage. The inscription reads: "For the memory and salvation of all those Armenians whose name the Lord knows." Beneath a corner of the mosaic is a small, natural cave which contained human bones dating to the 5th or 6th centuries. The symbolism of the mosaic and the presence of the burial cave indicates that the room was used as a mortuary chapel.[19] An exceptionally well preserved, carpet-like mosaic floor was uncovered in 1949 in Bethany, the early Byzantine church of the Lazarium which was built between 333 and 390. Because of its purely geometrical pattern, the church floor is to be grouped with other mosaics of the time in Palestine and neighboring areas, especially the Constantinian mosaics in the central nave at Bethlehem.[20] A second church was built above the older one during the 6th century with another more simple geometric mosaic floor. Detail from the mosaic floor of the Byzantine church of in Masada. The monastic community lived here in the 5th–7th centuries. The monastic communities of the Judean Desert also decorated their monasteries with mosaic floors. The Monastery of Martyrius was founded in the end of the 5th century and it was re-discovered in 1982–85. The most important work of art here is the intact geometric mosaic floor of the refectory although the severely damaged church floor was similarly rich.[21] The mosaics in the church of the nearby Monastery of Euthymius are of later date (discovered in 1930). They were laid down in the Umayyad era, after a devastating earthquake in 659. Two six pointed stars and a red chalice are the most important surviving features. Detail from the mosaic floor of the Petra Church Mosaic art also flourished in Christian Petra where three Byzantine churches were discovered. The most important one was uncovered in 1990. It is known that the walls were also covered with golden glass mosaics but only the floor panels survived as usual. The mosaic of the seasons in the southern aisle is from this first building period from the middle of the 5th century. In the first half of the 6th century the mosaics of the northern aisle and the eastern end of the southern aisle were installed. They depict native as well as exotic or mythological animals, and personifications of the Seasons, Ocean, Earth and Wisdom.[22] The Arab conquest of the Middle East in the 7th century did not break off the art of mosaic making. Arabs learned and accepted the craft as their own and carried on the classical tradition. During the Umayyad era Christianity retained its importance, churches were built and repaired and some of the most important mosaics of the Christian East were made during the 8th century when the region was under Islamic rule. The mosaics of the Church of St Stephen in ancient Kastron Mefaa (now Umm ar-Rasas) were made in 785 (discovered after 1986). The perfectly preserved mosaic floor is the largest one in Jordan. On the central panel hunting and fishing scenes are depicted while another panel illustrates the most important cities of the region. The frame of the mosaic is especially decorative. Six mosaic masters signed the work: Staurachios from Esbus, Euremios, Elias, Constantinus, Germanus and Abdela. It overlays another, damaged, mosaic floor of the earlier (587) "Church of Bishop Sergius." Another four churches were excavated nearby with traces of mosaic decoration. The last great mosaics in Madaba were made in 767 in the Church of the Virgin Mary (discovered in 1887). It is a masterpiece of the geometric style with a Greek inscription in the central medallion. With the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in 750 the Middle East went through deep cultural changes. No great mosaics were made after the end of the 8th century and the majority of churches gradually fell into disrepair and were eventually destroyed. The tradition of mosaic making died out among the Christians and also in the Islamic community. Orthodox countries[edit] Early 12th-centuryKievan mosaic depictingSt. Demetrius. The craft has also been popular in early medieval Rus, inherited as part of the Byzantine tradition. Yaroslav, the Grand Prince of theKievan Rus' built a large cathedral in his capital, Kiev. The model of the church was the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and it was also called Saint Sophia Cathedral. It was built mainly by Byzantine master craftsmen, sent by Constantine Monomachos, between 1037 and 1046. Naturally the more important surfaces in the interior were decorated with golden mosaics. In the dome we can see the traditional stern Pantokrator supported by angels. Between the 12 windows of the drum were apostles and the four evangelists on the pendentives. The apse is dominated by an orant Theotokos with a Deesis in three medallions above. Below is a Communion of the Apostles. Apse mosaic "Glory of the Theotokos" in Gelati, Georgia. c. 1125–1130. Prince Sviatopolk II built St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kiev in 1108. The mosaics of the church are undoubtedly works of Byzantine artists. Although the church was destroyed by Soviet authorities, majority of the panels were preserved. Small parts of ornamental mosaic decoration from the 12th century survived in the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod but this church was largely decorated with frescoes. Using mosaics and frescoes in the same building was a unique practice in Ukraine. Harmony was achieved by using the same dominant colors in mosaic and fresco. Both Saint Sophia Cathedral and Saint Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kiev use this technique.[23] Mosaics stopped being used for church decoration as early as the 12th century in the eastern Slavic countries. Later Russian churches were decorated with frescoes, similarly then orthodox churches in the Balkan. The apse mosaic of the Gelati Monastery is a rare example of mosaic use in Georgia. Began by king David IV and completed by his son Demetrius I of Georgia, the fragmentary panel depicts Theotokos flanked by two archangels. The use of mosaic in Gelati attests to some Byzantine influence in the country and was a demonstration of the imperial ambition of the Bagrationids. The mosaic covered church could compete in magnificence with the churches of Constantinople. Gelati is one of few mosaic creations which survived in Georgia but fragments prove that the early churches of Pitsunda and Tsromi were also decorated with mosaic as well as other, lesser known sites. The destroyed 6th century mosaic floors in the Pitsunda Cathedral have been inspired by Roman prototypes. In Tsromi the tesserae are still visible on the walls of the 7th-century church but only faint lines hint at the original scheme. Its central figure was Christ standing and displaying a scroll with Georgian text. Jewish mosaics[edit] Zodiac wheel on the floor of thesynagogue in Sepphoris Under Roman and Byzantine influence Jews also decorated their synagogues with classical floor mosaics. Many interesting examples were discovered in Galilee and the Judean Desert. The remains of a 6th-century synagogue have been uncovered in Sepphoris, which was an important centre of Jewish culture between the 3rd–7th centuries and a multicultural town inhabited by Jews, Christians and pagans. The mosaic reflects an interesting fusion of Jewish and pagan beliefs. In the center of the floor the zodiac wheel was depicted. Helios sits in the middle, in his sun chariot, and each zodiac is matched with a Jewish month. Along the sides of the mosaic are strips depicting Biblical scenes, such as the binding of Isaac, as well as traditional rituals, including a burnt sacrifice and the offering of fruits and grains. Another zodiac mosaic decorated the floor of the Beit Alfa synagogue which was built during the reign of Justin I (518–27). It is regarded one of the most important mosaics discovered in Israel. Each of its three panels depicts a scene – the Holy Ark, the zodiac, and the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. In the center of the zodiac is Helios, the sun god, in his chariot. The four women in the corners of the mosaic represent the four seasons. A third superbly preserved zodiac mosaic was discovered in the Severus synagogue in the ancient resort town of Hammat Tiberias. In the center of the 4th-century mosaic the Sun god, Helios sits in his chariot holding the celestial sphere and a whip. Nine of the 12 signs of the zodiac survived intact. Another panel shows the Ark of Covenant and Jewish cultic objects used in the Temple at Jerusalem. In 1936, a synagogue was excavated in Jericho which was named Shalom Al Yisrael Synagogue after an inscription on its mosaic floor ("Peace on Israel"). It appears to have been in use from the 5th to 8th centuries and contained a big mosaic on the floor with drawings of the Ark of the Covenant, the Menorah, a Shofar and aLulav. Nearby in Naaran, there is another synagogue (discovered in 1918) from the 6th century that also has a mosaic floor. The synagogue in Eshtemoa (As-Samu) was built around the 4th century. The mosaic floor is decorated with only floral and geometric patterns. The synagogue inKhirbet Susiya (excavated in 1971–72, founded in the end of the 4th century) has three mosaic panels, the eastern one depicting a Torah shrine, two menorahs, alulav and an etrog with columns, deer and rams. The central panel is geometric while the western one is seriously damaged but it has been suggested that it depictedDaniel in the lion’s den. The Roman synagogue in Ein Gedi was remodeled in the Byzantine era and a more elaborate mosaic floor was laid down above the older white panels. The usual geometric design was enriched with birds in the center. It includes the names of the signs of the zodiac and important figures from the Jewish past but not their images suggesting that it served a rather conservative community. The ban on figurative depiction was not taken so seriously by the Jews living in Byzantine Gaza. In 1966 remains of a synagogue were found in the ancient harbour area. Its mosaic floor depicts King David as Orpheus, identified by his name in Hebrew letters. Near him were lion cubs, a giraffe and a snake listening to him playing a lyre. A further portion of the floor was divided by medallions formed by vine leaves, each of which contains an animal: a lioness suckling her cub, a giraffe, peacocks, panthers, bears, a zebra and so on. The floor was paved in 508/509. It is very similar to that of the synagogue at Maon (Menois) and the Christian church at Shellal, suggesting that the same artist most probably worked at all three places. The House of Leontius in Bet She'an (excavated in 1964–72) is a rare example of a synagogue which was part of an inn. It was built in the Byzantine period. The colorful mosaic floor of the synagogue room had an outer stripe decorated with flowers and birds, around medallions with animals, created by vine trellises emerging from an amphora. The central medallion enclosed a menorah (candelabrum) beneath the word shalom (peace). A 5th-century building in Huldah may be a Samaritan synagogue. Its mosaic floor contains typical Jewish symbols (menorah, lulav, etrog) but the inscriptions are Greek. Another Samaritan synagogue with a mosaic floor was located in Bet She'an (excavated in 1960). The floor had only decorative motifs and an aedicule (shrine) with cultic symbols. The ban on human or animal images was more strictly observed by the Samaritans than their Jewish neighbours in the same town (see above). The mosaic was laid by the same masters who made the floor of the Beit Alfa synagogue. One of the inscriptions was written in Samaritan script. In 2003, a synagogue of the 5th or 6th century was uncovered in the coastal Ionian town of Saranda, Albania. It had exceptional mosaics depicting items associated with Jewish holidays, including a menorah, ram's horn, and lemon tree. Mosaics in the basilica of the synagogue show the facade of what resembles a Torah, animals, trees, and other biblical symbols. The structure measures 20 by 24 m. and was probably last used in the 6th century as a church. Middle Eastern and Western Asian art[edit] Pre-Islamic Arabia[edit] In South Arabia two mosaic works were excavated in a Qatabanian from the late 3rd century, those two plates formed geometric and grapevines formation reflecting the traditions of that culture. In the Ghassanid era religious mosaic art flourished in their territory, so far five churches with mosaic were recorded from that era, two built by Ghassanid rulers and the other three by the Christian Arab community who wrote their names and dedications. Floor pavement representing female dancers, Shapur palace, Bishapur Pre-Islamic Persia[edit] Tilework had been known there for about two thousand years when cultural exchange between Sassanid Empire and Romans influenced Persian artists to create mosaic patterns. Shapur I decorated his palace with tile compositions depicting dancers, musicians, courtesans, etc. This was the only significant example of figurative Persian mosaic, which became prohibited after Arab conquest and arrival of Islam. Islamic art[edit] Main article: Islamic art Complex Mosaic patterns also known as Girih are popular forms of architectural art in many Muslimcultures. Tomb of Hafez, Shiraz, Iran Arab[edit] Islamic mosaics inside theDome of the Rock inPalestine (c. 690) Islamic architecture used mosaic technique to decorate religious buildings and palaces after the Muslim conquests of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire. In Syria and Egypt the Arabs were influenced by the great tradition of Roman and Early Christian mosaic art. During the Umayyad Dynasty mosaic making remained a flourishing art form in Islamic culture and it is continued in the art of zellige and azulejo in various parts of the Arab world, although tile was to become the main Islamic form of wall decoration. The first great religious building of Islam, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which was built between 688–692, was decorated with glass mosaics both inside and outside, by craftsmen of the Byzantine tradition. Only parts of the original interior decoration survive. The rich floral motifs follow Byzantine traditions, and are "Islamic only in the sense that the vocabulary is syncretic and does not include representation of men or animals."[24] The Umayyad mosaics of Hisham's Palace closely followed classical traditions The most important early Islamic mosaic work is the decoration of the Umayyad Mosque inDamascus, then capital of the Arab Caliphate. The mosque was built between 706 and 715. The caliph obtained 200 skilled workers from the Byzantine Emperor to decorate the building. This is evidenced by the partly Byzantine style of the decoration. The mosaics of the inner courtyard depict Paradise with beautiful trees, flowers and small hill towns and villages in the background. The mosaics include no human figures, which makes them different from the otherwise similar contemporary Byzantine works. The biggest continuous section survives under the western arcade of the courtyard, called the "Barada Panel" after the river Barada. It is thought that the mosque used to have the largest gold mosaic in the world, at over 4 m2. In 1893 a fire damaged the mosque extensively, and many mosaics were lost, although some have been restored since. The mosaics of the Umayyad Mosque gave inspiration to later Damascene mosaic works. The Dome of the Treasury, which stands in the mosque courtyard, is covered with fine mosaics, probably dating from 13th- or 14th-century restoration work. The style of them are strikingly similar to the Barada Panel. The mausoleum of Sultan Baibars, Madrassa Zahiriyah, which was built after 1277, is also decorated with a band of golden floral and architectural mosaics, running around inside the main prayer hall.[25] Non-religious Umayyad mosaic works were mainly floor panels which decorated the palaces of the caliphs and other high-ranking officials. They were closely modeled after the mosaics of the Roman country villas, once common in the Eastern Mediterranean. The most superb example can be found in the bath house of Hisham's Palace, Palestine which was made around 744. The main panel depicts a large tree and underneath it a lion attacking a deer (right side) and two deers peacefully grazing (left side). The panel probably represents good and bad governance. Mosaics with classical geometric motifs survived in the bath area of the 8th-century Umayyad palace complex in Anjar, Lebanon. The luxurious desert residence of Al-Walid II in Qasr al-Hallabat (in present-day Jordan) was also decorated with floor mosaics that show a high level of technical skill. The best preserved panel at Hallabat is divided by a Tree of Life flanked by "good" animals on one side and "bad" animals on the other. Among the Hallabat representations are vine scrolls, grapes, pomegranates, oryx, wolves, hares, a leopard, pairs of partridges, fish, bulls, ostriches, rabbits, rams, goats, lions and a snake. At Qastal, near Amman, excavations in 2000 uncovered the earliest known Umayyad mosaics in present-day Jordan, dating probably from the caliphate of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (685–705). They cover much of the floor of a finely decorated building that probably served as the palace of a local governor. The Qastal mosaics depict geometrical patterns, trees, animals, fruits and rosettes. Except for the open courtyard, entrance and staircases, the floors of the entire palace were covered in mosaics.[26] Golden mosaics in the dome of theGreat Mosque in Corduba, Moorish Spain (965–970) Some of the best examples of later Islamic mosaics were produced in Moorish Spain. The golden mosaics in the mihrab and the central dome of the Great Mosque in Corduba have a decidedly Byzantine character. They were made between 965 and 970 by local craftsmen, supervised by a master mosaicist from Constantinople, who was sent by the Byzantine Emperor to the Umayyad Caliph of Spain. The decoration is composed of colorful floral arabesques and wide bands of Arab calligraphy. The mosaics were purported to evoke the glamour of the Great Mosque in Damascus, which was lost for the Umayyad family.[27] Mosaics generally went out of fashion in the Islamic world after the 8th century. Similar effects were achieved by the use of painted tilework, either geometric with small tiles, sometimes called mosaic, like the zillij of North Africa, or larger tiles painted with parts of a large decorative scheme (Qashani) in Persia, Turkey and further east. Modern mosaics[edit] Mosaic embedded in stone wall, Italian area of Switzerland Running Rug, 2001 – structural mosaic work by Marcelo de Melo Noted 19th-century mosaics include those by Edward Burne-Jones at St Pauls within the Walls in Rome.[28] Another modern mosaic of note is the world's largest mosaic installation located at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, located in St. Louis, Missouri.[29] A modern example of mosaic is the Museum of Natural History station of the New York City Subway(there are many such works of art scattered throughout the New York City subway system, though many IND stations are usually designed with bland mosaics.) Another example of mosaics in ordinary surroundings is the use of locally themed mosaics in some restrooms in the rest areas along some Texas interstate highways. Some modern mosaics are the work of modernisme style architects Antoni Gaudí andJosep Maria Jujol, for example the mosaics in the Park Güell in Barcelona. Today, among the leading figures of the mosaic world are Emma Biggs (UK), Marcelo de Melo (Brazil), Sonia King (USA) and Saimir Strati (Albania). Mosaics as a popular craft[edit] A detail of mosaic mural made of modern bottle screw tops. A high school in Jerusalem, Israel Mosaics have developed into a popular craft and art, and are not limited to professionals.[30] Today's artisans and crafters work with stone, ceramics, shells, art glass, mirror, beads, and even odd items like doll parts, pearls, or photographs. While ancient mosaics tended to be architectural, modern mosaics are found covering everything from park benches and flowerpots to guitars and bicycles. Items can be as small as an earring or as large as a house. Mosaics in street art[edit] A work by Invader in Emaux de Briare. In styles that owe as much to videogame pixel art and popculture as to traditional mosaic, street art has seen a novel reinvention and expansion of mosaic artwork. The most prominent artist working with mosaics in street art is the French Invader. He has done almost all his work in two very distinct mosaic styles, the first of which are small "traditional" tile mosaics of 8 bit video game character, installed in cities across the globe, and the second of which are a style he refers to as "Rubikcubism", which uses a kind of dual layer mosaic via grids of scrambled Rubik's Cubes. Although he is the most prominent, other street and urban artists do work in Mosaic styles as well. Calçada Portuguesa[edit] Main article: Portuguese pavement Copacabana (Rio de Janeiro) Portuguese pavement (in Portuguese, Calçada Portuguesa) is a kind of two-tone stone mosaic paving created in Portugal, and common throughout the Lusosphere. Most commonly taking the form of geometric patterns from the simple to the complex, it also is used to create complex pictorial mosaics in styles ranging from iconography to classicism and even modern design. In Portuguese-speaking countries, many cities have a large amount of their sidewalks and even, though far more occasionally, streets done in this mosaic form. Lisbon in particular maintains almost all walkways in this style.[31] Mosaic art at Bonifacio High Streetin Bonifacio Global City, Philippines Despite its prevalence and popularity throughout Portugal and its former colonies, and its relation to older art and architectural styles like Azulejo, Portuguese and Spanish painted tilework, it is a relatively young mosaic artform, its first definitive appearance in a modernly recognizable form being in the mid-1800s. Among the most commonly used stones in this style are basalt and limestone. Terminology[edit] Fernand Léger – Grand parade with red background, mosaic 1958 (designed 1953). National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Australia Mosaic is an art form which uses small pieces of materials placed together to create a unified whole. The materials commonly used are marble or other stone, glass, pottery, mirror or foil-backed glass, or shells. The word mosaic is from the Italian mosaico deriving from the Latin mosaicus and ultimately from the Greek mouseios meaningbelonging to the Muses, hence artistic. Each piece of material is a Tessera (plural: tesserae). The space in between where the grout goes is an interstice. Andamento is the word used to describe the movement and flow of Tesserae. The 'opus', the Latin for ‘work’, is the way in which the pieces are cut and placed. Common techniques include: · Opus regulatum: A grid; all tesserae align both vertically and horizontally. · Opus tessellatum: Tesserae form vertical or horizontal rows, but not both. · Opus vermiculatum: One or more lines of tesserae follow the edge of a special shape (letters or a major central graphic). · Opus musivum: Vermiculatum extends throughout the entire background. · Opus palladianum: Instead of forming rows, tesserae are irregularly shaped. Also known as "crazy paving". · Opus sectile: A major shape (e.g. heart, letter, cat) is formed by a single tessera, as later in pietra dura. · Opus classicum: When vermiculatum is combined with tessellatum or regulatum. · Opus circumactum: Tesserae are laid in overlapping semicircles or fan shapes. · Micromosaic: using very small tesserae, in Byzantine icons and Italian panels for jewellery from the Renaissance on. Three techniques[edit] Tool table for ancient Roman mosaics at Roman villa of La Olmeda in Pedrosa de la Vega, Province of Palencia (Castile and León,Spain). These are the hammer and hardie,mosaic tools used for cutting stone by Italian mosaic artists There are three main methods: the direct method, the indirect method and the double indirect method. Direct method[edit] A 'Direct Method' mosaic courtyard made from irregular pebbles and stone strips, Li Jiang, Yunnan, PRC (China) The direct method of mosaic construction involves directly placing (gluing) the individual tesserae onto the supporting surface. This method is well suited to surfaces that have a three-dimensional quality, such as vases. This was used for the historic European wall and ceiling mosaics, following underdrawings of the main outlines on the wall below, which are often revealed again when the mosaic falls away. The direct method suits small projects that are transportable. Another advantage of the direct method is that the resulting mosaic is progressively visible, allowing for any adjustments to tile color or placement. The disadvantage of the direct method is that the artist must work directly at the chosen surface, which is often not practical for long periods of time, especially for large-scale projects. Also, it is difficult to control the evenness of the finished surface. This is of particular importance when creating a functional surface such as a floor or a table top. A modern version of the direct method, sometimes called "double direct," is to work directly onto fiberglass mesh. The mosaic can then be constructed with the design visible on the surface and transported to its final location. Large work can be done in this way, with the mosaic being cut up for shipping and then reassembled for installation. It enables the artist to work in comfort in a studio rather than at the site of installation. Indirect method[edit] The indirect method of applying tesserae is often used for very large projects, projects with repetitive elements or for areas needing site specific shapes. Tiles are applied face-down to a backing paper using an adhesive, and later transferred onto walls, floors or craft projects. This method is most useful for extremely large projects as it gives the maker time to rework areas, allows the cementing of the tiles to the backing panel to be carried out quickly in one operation and helps ensure that the front surfaces of the mosaic tiles and mosaic pieces are flat and in the same plane on the front, even when using tiles and pieces of differing thicknesses. Mosaic murals, benches and tabletops are some of the items usually made using the indirect method, as it results in a smoother and more even surface. Double indirect method[edit] The double indirect method can be used when it is important to see the work during the creation process as it will appear when completed. The tesserae are placed face-up on a medium (often adhesive-backed paper, sticky plastic or soft lime or putty) as it will appear when installed. When the mosaic is complete, a similar medium is placed atop it. The piece is then turned over, the original underlying material is carefully removed, and the piece is installed as in the indirect method described above. In comparison to the indirect method, this is a complex system to use and requires great skill on the part of the operator, to avoid damaging the work. Its greatest advantage lies in the possibility of the operator directly controlling the final result of the work, which is important e.g. when the human figure is involved. This method was created in 1989 by Maurizio Placuzzi and registered for industrial use (patent n. 0000222556) under the name of his company, Sicis International Srl, now Sicis The Art Mosaic Factory Srl. Mathematics[edit] Further information: tessellation and mathematics and art The best way to arrange variously shaped tiles on a surface leads to the mathematical field of tessellation.[32] The artist M. C. Escher was influenced by Moorish mosaics to begin his investigations into tessellation.[33] Digital imaging[edit] A mosaic in digital imaging is a plurality of non-overlapping images, arranged in some tessellation. A photomosaic is a picture made up of various other pictures (pioneered by Joseph Francis), in which each "pixel" is another picture, when examined closely. This form has been adopted in many modern media and digital image searches.[34] A tile mosaic is a digital image made up of individual tiles, arranged in a non-overlapping fashion, e.g. to make a static image on a shower room or bathing pool floor, by breaking the image down into square pixels formed from ceramic tiles (a typical size is 1 in × 1 in (25 mm × 25 mm), as for example, on the floor of the University of Toronto pool, though sometimes larger tiles such as 2 in × 2 in (51 mm × 51 mm) are used). These digital images are coarse in resolution and often simply express text, such as the depth of the pool in various places, but some such digital images are used to show a sunset or other beach theme. Recent developments in digital image processing have led to the ability to design physical tile mosaics using computer aided design (CAD) software. The software typically takes as inputs a source bitmap and a palette of colored tiles. The software makes a best-fit match of the tiles to the source image. Robotic manufacturing[edit] With high cost of labor in developed countries, production automation has become increasingly popular. Rather than being assembled by hand, mosaics designed using computer aided design (CAD) software can be assembled by a robot. Production can be greater than 10 times faster with higher accuracy. But these "computer" mosaics have a different look than hand-made "artisanal" mosaics. With robotic production, colored tiles are loaded into buffers, and then the robot picks and places tiles individually according to a command file from the design software.[35] How the market revolution helped bring Judaism to the American frontier. By Jonathan Sarna 572 0 Print this page We Also Recommend American Jews at the Turn of the Century Jewish Immigration to America: Three Waves Reprinted with permission from American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press). The America that Jewish immigrants from Central Europe encountered [in the 19th century] when they disembarked in coastal port cities was in the throes of economic change. What had been, outside of a few port cities, a largely subsistence economy–consisting of small farms and tiny workshops that satisfied local needs through barter and exchange–gave way during the first half of the 19th century to a market-driven economy in which farmers and manu facturers produced food and goods that they shipped for cash to sometimes distant places. Canals, turnpikes, and later railroad tracks linked far-separated points of the country, producing a vast national transportation network along which goods and commodities flowed. Foot Soldiers The result was what historians call a market revolution. Entrepreneurial values coupled with new economic and cultural resources enabled people “to make choices on a scale previously unparalleled: choices of goods to consume, choices of occupations to follow educational choices, choices of lifestyles and identities.” As we shall see, the market revolution also profoundly shaped the lives of America’s growing community of Jews. They too now made choices on a scale previously un paralleled, ones that affected their patterns of settlement, their occupational preferences, their values and attitudes, and the practices of their faith. Peddlers were the foot soldiers of this far-reaching revolution. They were the proverbial middlemen who purchased goods (usually on credit) from producers and set forth to transport and market them to far-flung con sumers, residents of America’s rapidly expanding frontier. Peddling was a difficult and tiring occupation, but it required very little capital and prom ised substantial returns. As the desire for goods rose among those who once found most of what they needed close to home but now pined for luxuries from faraway places, young, vigorous, success-minded immigrants rushed in to meet the burgeoning demand. Many of these immigrants–indeed, most of the 16,000 peddlers listed by the 1860 census-taker, ac cording to one source–were Jews. Peddling helped launch the Jewish migration out of Germany and its predecessor states. The knowledge that thousands of young single men could come to America and get on the road, laden with a jumble of goods on their backs, and reasonably hope to end up a married proprietor of a thriving business, propelled them. The fact that they could fulfill the aims of their migration, settle down, and succeed in business, also helped change the face of the Jewish world for decades to come. Author » Hasia Diner, New York University Published: February 11, 2014 Updated: May 28, 2014 § Peddling as a Profession: A Widespread Activity § Why Peddling was Popular § The Daily Realities of Peddling § The Peddling Profession and Integration into American Society § The Business of Peddling: Jewish Networks in America § Life After Peddling § Notes Peddling as a Profession: A Widespread Activity In the period from the 1820s through the 1880s nearly 250,000 Jews came from the various states and regions that in 1871 coalesced into a united Germany. This constituted the first mass migration of Jews to the United States. Prior to 1820 no more than 2,000 Jews lived there. These immigrant women and men established the basic economic and communal patterns which would continue to characterize American Jewish life even after the latter part of the nineteenth century when several million Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated and vastly outnumbered those from the German-speaking lands and their children. Most of the men among these immigrants opted for on-the-road peddling as their start-up occupation in their new American home. Those who did not peddle owned shops, peddler warehouses, and manufactured the goods that Jewish peddlers sold. The near universality of the decision of so many German Jewish immigrants to begin their lives in America as peddlersshaped much of their subsequent lives as well as of the families and communities they built. The numbers of German Jewish immigrant men who peddled cannot be accurately determined. For one, most only peddled for a few years and as such likely eluded the detection of the decennial United States Census. That is, an individual may have arrived in the United States in 1853 and peddled until 1856. He could not have shown up in the 1850 Census but by 1860 would have rightly listed himself as a shopkeeper or manufacturer, and his peddling years would have never been registered as such. So too since peddlers did not have a fixed place of abode, but rather came to some town for the weekends only, spending the rest of their time on the road, they would likely not have been found at home and written down by the census taker as peddlers. City directories likewise enumerated individuals and businesses with fixed addresses, precisely what the peddler lacked. R.G. Dunn, the nation’s most significant credit rating agency paid attention to settled merchants, and while its reporters sometimes made note of Jewish shopkeepers who had once peddled, they offered little evidence about those men peddling at any given moment. Applications for peddlers’ licenses could provide some kind of estimate of the number and names of peddlers, to be derived state by state and county by county. These forms did not ask religion or birthplace, making them relatively opaque vis-à-vistrying to estimate the number of German-born Jewish peddlers in America. Additionally untold numbers of peddlers did not bother to take out licenses so even such official documents fail to tell the story—a story that extended from the 1820s all the way into the early twentieth century, although by the 1860s Jews from Lithuania began to swell the ranks of the peddlers. Some local Jewish communities at times made note of the occupational profile of those men who belonged to the synagogue. Again this put peddlers at a disadvantage, at least from the perspective of knowing how many of them lived in a particular place at a given time. Since they spent most of the week on the road and rarely had a fixed abode, they did not necessarily join communal organizations or show up as permanent residents in communal documents. Most men joined congregations only when they settled down, not during their years of itinerant selling. While peddlers would have had full access to the services provided by the synagogues, including the right to worship, to be helped by communal charity, and if need be, to secure a proper Jewish burial, they did not pay dues and therefore did not show up on the synagogues’ rolls as members. While peddlers used particular communities as their home bases—the places where they got their goods and rested over the weekend—the peddlers did not belong to these communities, but rather came in and then went out. Local general newspapers contained articles, randomly, about Jewish peddlers, either describing their activities or chronicling some tragedy that befell them, particularly robberies and murders. The two nationally circulating American Jewish newspapers of the mid-nineteenth century also provide occasional information about the spread of Jewish peddlers across the United States. Isaac Leeser’s newspaper, The Occident, published in Philadelphia starting in 1843, and Cincinnati-basedThe American Israelite, published by Isaac Mayer Wise as early as 1854, offered vignettes and news items about the Jewish communities forming around the country with references to peddlers not infrequently included. These newspapers also offered details on the adversities facing the peddlers and reported on murders of peddlers and the trials of those accused of such crimes. Despite the obstacles to arriving at an accurate count of the number of German Jewish immigrant peddlers, some historians of local Jewish communities have tried to do so. Using memoirs, autobiographies, family histories, and newspaper accounts they have pieced together items from the fragments of available material to demonstrate the tremendous concentration of Jewish immigrants from German-speaking lands who took their first steps in America as peddlers. The numbers and percentages derived from these sources leave no doubt as to the importance of this occupation and its formative impact on American and American Jewish history. They demonstrate the large number of Jews, who for some amount of time peddled, and the lack of any kind of regional boundaries to the phenomenon. A few examples will have to suffice. In Nashville, 23 percent of the adult male Jews in 1860 peddled, as did 25 percent of those in Boston between 1845 and 1861. In Easton, Pennsylvania, a town which occupied the strategic meeting point of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, 46 percent peddled in 1840, but just five years later, the number jumped to 70 percent. By 1850 the number had dropped to 55 percent, still a significant figure for any one occupation among a relatively small number of people. Of the 125 Jewish residents in Iowa in the 1850s, 100 peddled around the state, as did two-thirds of all the Jews in Syracuse, New York in that same decade before the Civil War. These men fanned out and hawked goods to the upstate communities, and used the inland waterways as the means by which they got to their designated areas for selling. Similar figures garnered from hundreds of community histories, Jewish newspapers of the time, and applications for peddlers’ licenses culled from other regional and state archives all point to the same phenomenon. The numbers and percentages would actually be larger if they took into account the not inconsiderable number of Jewish immigrant men in these years who owned stores but continued to do some peddling. While R.G. Dunn, the city director, or the U.S. Census listed them as storeowners of one kind or another, Jewish men augmented their business operations by continuing to peddle, as circumstances made it possible. If for example, a brother or nephew from Germany joined the merchant in his store as a clerk, the proprietor then could keep up his door-to-door selling. But from the perspective of any official or informal enumeration of local occupations, he qualified as a sedentary merchant and not an itinerant peddler. Why Peddling was Popular The thousands of Jewish immigrant men from Germany who peddled in the United States participated in this occupation not as a lifelong goal or as something they foresaw doing for decades. Rather they gravitated to this bottom-rung commercial occupation precisely because they calculated that they would not have to do it for very long, that it carried with it the seeds for mobility. In this it differed from artisanship, in which someone acquired a skill, used it, developed it and over the course of his life, continued to work in it. Maybe they did so at higher and higher levels, but still then stuck with the craft of their youth. Peddling served as a springboard to more lucrative and decidedly more comfortable occupations, ones which did not force its practitioners to walk the road for five days a week, selling goods door to door and house to house. German Jewish youth coming to America streamed into peddling for a number of reasons. First, they knew the occupation. If they, or even if their fathers, had not themselves been peddlers, this kind of trade constituted the backbone of the Jewish economy throughout the German-speaking regions. Along with cattle dealing, itinerant peddling by foot existed as a normal, well-establish modus vivendi for the Jews in all of central Europe.[1] The men who immigrated to America took up peddling almost as a matter of course. They also opted for peddling because word of the potential of peddling as a start-up occupation had drifted back to the German home communities of the emigrants. As young men left for America and wrote back home about the success they had found via this kind of trade, others decided to join in the emigrant stream and assumed that they would peddle. The occasional returnee, a man who came back to his home village after peddling in America, also demonstrated the power of the occupation to fulfill the migration’s aims. So too the money sent by peddlers in the form of remittances, used mostly to pay for the fare of their brothers to join them in America, also spoke volumes as to why someone should consider peddling. Additionally publications like the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums reported in glowing terms on the prospects in America for German Jewish youth and emphasized how peddling provided an excellent first step towards stable and prosperous careers. Secondly, peddling allowed the new immigrant to tap into personal and communal networks. They did not arrive in the United States adrift or without any clear idea as to where to go and how to get there, but rather family members already in America paved the path for them to get their goods and their routes. When a new immigrant had no family member to help, he could turn to local Jews who extended credit and provided goods for the peddler to get started. But, it required little personal capital for the neophyte peddler. Relatives already in the United States as well as friends and other townspeople from back home, mostly already shopkeepers in stores of their own, assisted the newcomer to get started. Those who helped had much to gain economically from their assistance. Additionally, the male-heavy nature of the migration made peddling the perfect launch occupation for their American lives. The Daily Realities of Peddling A distinctive way of making a living, peddling required that the man–since in the United States women nearly never engaged in it—knock on doors, go up to the homes of each one of his customers, cross their thresholds, communicate with them in their own language and develop a pleasant enough manner to convince them to buy something. It necessitated that the would-be peddler learn enough of the local language or languages to be able to communicate with women and men often very different from him. In order to sell, the peddler had to acquire insider cultural knowledge and be able to tap into the aspirations and sensibilities of a range of potential buyers, whom he had to engage with directly in their homes. Over time peddlers developed a list of steady customers, people whose homes they went to week after week. This necessary range of skills made peddling different from nearly every other occupation that immigrants entered in the nineteenth century. Immigrants from Germany or any place else who went into farming tended to live in close proximity to others from their same region, and they resembled each other in terms of language and religion. Immigrants who spoke German, Czech, Swedish, Norwegian, and other languages clustered at times in particular counties, and created relatively homogeneous enclaves that persisted for several generations in the nineteenth century. Likewise immigrant industrial laborers and artisans who settled in American cities, while they experienced much mixing across ethnic and linguistic lines, still enjoyed the cultural comfort of neighborhoods like New York’s Kleindeutschland which supported a vibrant German culture, with ethnically specific churches, saloons, shops, newspapers, clubs, and benevolent associations. The Jewish immigrant peddlers led very different lives, ones shaped by the nature of the occupation and that, in turn, had an impact upon the way they experienced America. Typically a peddler operated out of a particular city or town and specifically out of the Jewish enclave in that place. Obviously the larger the place, the larger the Jewish community, but even many very small towns had skeletal Jewish populations made up of a few shopkeepers. Those shopkeepers provided the peddlers with their goods, which they in turn carried to customers in the hinterlands, the regions beyond easy access to the towns. If the place had more than one Jewish shop, or if large enough, had a peddler warehouse, the peddlers could get goods from more than one entrepreneur. The peddlers operated on a weekly cycle. They left their base on Sunday or Monday, depending on how far they had to go. They would, if necessary, take the railroad or canal barges to get to their territories. They peddled all week and on Friday headed back to the town from which they had gotten their goods. Here on the Jewish Sabbath and, depending on geography, on Sundays as well, they rested, experiencing fellowship with the other immigrant Jewish peddlers who also operated out of this town. The peddlers engaged with the settled Jewish families, some of whom either operated boarding houses for peddlers or merely extended home hospitality to the men during their brief respites off the road. On the weekends the peddlers could partake of Sabbath religious services and consume some of the good food associated with Jewish holy time, food prepared in the distinctive manners of the various central European regions. Saturday night, after sundown, when the restrictions of the Sabbath lifted, the peddlers came to the shopkeepers and or other creditors to whom they owed money, paid up from the goods they had sold that week, and then filled up their bags, ready for another week on the road. Memoirs and autobiographies of former peddlers tell about the details of these weekend periods of rest in the scattered Jewish communities around the country. Simon Wolf, for example, who would eventually be a confidant of President Ulysses S. Grant and who might rightly be considered American Jewry’s first lobbyist, grew up in Ulrichsville, Ohio, having emigrated from Bavaria as a young boy. His uncle operated a store which served as the base for numerous immigrant peddlers, and he recalled how they spent many Sabbaths there. He wrote in his Reminiscences, how, “twenty to thirty Jewish peddlers…with their packs weighing from one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds,” routinely “managed to return on a Friday, so as to be with us on Saturday.” His aunt cooked for them and his uncle turned his store into a makeshift synagogue on Saturdays as the town had no such formal institution.[2] Peddlers other than Jews from the German-speaking regions plied their itinerant trade around the United States. Since the pre-national period, men from New England, with its poor soil and relatively stagnant agricultural economy, tried their hand at peddling in the South, the mid-Atlantic, and then with the opening up of the trans-Appalachian west, there as well. Yankee peddling persisted, but in the main the Jewish peddler supplanted him as of the 1820s and beyond. Some Irish and non-Jewish Germans also peddled, but for these groups peddling neither shaped community life nor did it constitute a formative or mass experience. But Jews from Bavaria, Posen, Baden, and other regions that became part of Germany, as well as many from Alsace, Bohemia and western Russia, migrating between 1820 and the 1880s, were different. They constituted the only immigrant group for whom peddling represented a—or the—foundational occupation. Jews leaving those central European areas went to countries other than the United States. A sizable number went to England, to other parts of the British Isles, and to Sweden. Some even went to southern Africa starting in the 1860s and Australia that same decade. In all of these places they also turned to peddling as their initial occupation and experienced the same trajectory out of peddling into more permanent and sedentary commercial enterprises. But of all the places to which some of them went, the United States emerged as the most attractive and sought-after destination. The tens of thousands of young Jewish men who left central Europe because they could find no place in the economic order there and went to the United States, a dynamic economy with many places for young white men to get started on the bottom, got caught up in “America fever.” Jewish peddlers from Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe fanned out all over the United States going to all kinds of communities. They peddled on the edges of large cities. At a time when respectable white women did not feel comfortable going out in public to shop, where roads and streets had not been fully paved, or where little in the way of easily accessible retail existed, peddlers came to their homes. Jewish peddlers showed up on farms shortly after new regions opened with the spread of the American population across the continent over the course of the nineteenth century. As Americans moved increasingly to the west and as immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia, and various parts of central Europe went to one farming region after another, the peddlers followed closely upon their heels, offering these pioneers living under relatively primitive conditions some of the material amenities of urban settled life. Jewish peddlers also went along with railroad, road building, canal digging, and mining crews. Wherever people lived somewhat removed from markets where they could buy goods, Jewish immigrant peddlers arrived, filling the void. Jewish immigrant peddlers, for example, showed up in California almost simultaneously with the gold prospectors in the late 1840s and they could be found every time new lodes opened up, whether in Nevada, Colorado, or South Dakota. Similarly in the West Virginia and Pennsylvania coal mining regions, Jewish peddlers supplied the needs of the families of the coal miners. Jewish peddlers did not avoid the South either. They sold to, among others, slave owners and the slaves themselves. They came onto cotton plantations, catering to the needs of both classes. To say that they catered to the “needs” of customers deserves a bit of an elaboration. They tended not to sell such goods that would be deemed a necessity at the time. The peddlers did not sell food or fuel. Rather they sold a jumble of goods that might be considered quasi-luxuries. In their bags they carried needles, threads, lace, ribbons, mirrors, pictures and picture frames, watches, jewelry, eye glasses, linens, bedding, and other sundry goods, sometimes called “Yankee notions.” They carried some clothing and cloth, as well as patterns for women to sew their own clothes, and other items to be worn. At times they carried samples of clothes and shoes, measured their customers, and then on return visits brought the finished products with them. When the peddlers graduated from selling from packs on their backs to selling from horse and wagon, they offered more in the way of heavy items, such as stoves and sewing machines. Peddlers constantly expanded the goods they offered, trying to respond to customer demand and to the newest items being offered in the cities. Whether a peddler sold to white or African-American customers, Native Americans or native-born white farmers, one matter united them all. They sold only to non-Jews. Unlike in Europe, in places like Bavaria or the Rhineland where many, possibly most, Jews peddled, in America the Jewish peddlers never sold to Jewish customers. The Jews lived in the towns and supplied the peddlers, while the peddlers went out onto the road to find the Christian customers. The peddlers penetrated the hinterlands and sold to the farmers, miners, loggers, or laboring families on the outskirts of the cities, all Christian. In Europe where Jews lived in many scattered small towns and villages, on-the-road peddlers could take shelter for the night in Jewish homes or in inns operated by Jewish proprietors. They could have access to kosher food, could pray with other Jews, and speak in their own language, namely Judeo-German or Yiddish. In Michigan, Minnesota, upstate New York, Mississippi, Nebraska, and all the other places around the United States, however, peddlers could not lodge with Jewish families and stay in Jewish homes, as they spent the days of the week away from their communities. Fragmentary evidence about the experiences of Jewish peddlers in the decades before and after the Civil War, most having come from the German states and surrounding regions, exists for literally every state in the Union. Jewish peddlers often showed up before territories achieved statehood, and their presence signified the arrival of material goods for the white American settlers, attracted by the availability of inexpensive land and of resources for exploitation. Often the first Jews to come to any given town or region, peddlers expanded the commercial options for the women and men who lived in these places. Just a few examples of the peddlers as the pioneers of commerce and of the Jewish people in America will have to suffice. The first Jews of Rochester, New York, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Sioux City, Iowa, Chico, California, Chicago, Monmouth County, New Jersey, Cincinnati, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Atlanta, and hundreds of other communities, came as peddlers. They sold in and around these areas and then when they had amassed enough savings, which they stored with the Jewish shopkeepers who had provisioned them, they settled down and became shopkeepers. The presence of these Jewish shopkeepers drew other Jews to these places, the newest immigrants eager to get in on the bottom rung of the commercial economy as peddlers. For the customers, the arrival of the peddlers meant that they did not have to depend upon the few local shopkeepers for the goods they wanted. The peddlers could offer the same items at a lower cost. They could bring these items directly into the customers’ homes, showing them, for example, how the curtains or the tablecloth would look. Because they had close to no overhead, the peddler could offer the merchandise at lower rates of interest on an installment plan than the in-town merchant with the fixed costs that came with owning a store and providing a home for his family. Peddlers could, additionally, get to the women and men who lived too far from town to be able to go shopping. That too made them indispensible to the people, both native-born Americans and immigrants, who pushed out to the new regions of the continent—one of the key developments of nineteenth century American life. In a variety of places, in coal mining regions and on slave plantations, the commercial activities of the peddlers allowed poor and subjugated men and women a chance to circumvent oppressive systems. For miners, loggers, and railroad workers, the peddlers provided an alternative to the company store, the emporium owned and operated by their employers. The employers charged exorbitant prices, extended credit at usurious rates, and often took these purchases out of the wages of the workers. The immigrant Jewish peddlers had no connection to the employers and they provided the customers with a chance to buy what they liked and at dramatically lower prices. In the American South a particular pattern emerged. Jewish peddlers came onto the cotton plantations. They sold to the planters, offering usually higher end goods, well within the ability of the white planters to afford. They enjoyed the privilege of being defined as white and at times, despite being immigrants with limited English, they socialized with the landowners. Some plantations actually maintained a special room where the peddler could sleep for the night, so much did the planter class look forward to the visits of the peddlers. But the peddlers also sold to the slaves. Planters often allowed slaves to earn some money. Skilled slaves could rent themselves out and while they had to turn over some of their wages to their owners, they could keep some. Other times slaves could earn money by raising crops in their gardens. And, with their earnings, the slaves would avail themselves of the goods the peddlers had to offer. While owners at time feared that the peddlers could be spreading abolitionist propaganda and aiding in slave escapes, they did not bar the peddlers from entering their farms. The particular tempo of peddler activities fit their business needs and the wishes of their customers. Peddlers sold on the installment plan, taking a small down payment for goods purchased, charging small amounts of interest. Each week the peddler came back to get the payment on the good already purchased and hoped in the while to interest the customers in something new. For customers the weekly visit of the peddler, not infrequently labeled the “Jew peddler” broke up the isolation of farm life. The women, children, and men visited weekly by the peddlers looked forward to his showing up, as he displayed the array of goods from inside his bag and provided gossip about neighbors, information about the doings in town and stories about what was happening in the big world beyond the immediate area. Peddling certainly had its liabilities. Alone on the road, uncomfortable and exposed to the elements, peddlers faced many physical and emotional burdens. They carried heavy packs. They had to struggle for places to stay at night and if the customers did not invite them in, they had to sleep on the ground or in the back of the wagon. As unarmed men, the peddlers fell victim to robbers and even murderers, who were tempted by the cash and goods the peddlers lugged around. Peddling had its own hierarchy. The newest immigrant stood at the bottom and he had to go by foot along his route. He could cover a relatively limited territory and labored under the burden of, at times, over 100 pounds. The foot peddler aspired to reach the next plateau, namely to be able to rent or buy a wagon and horse. Achieving this stage made it possible for him to both sell to a larger array of customers living further apart from each other and to carry heavier goods. It also brought another benefit in terms of expanding his business operation. Peddlers with wagons could also become essentially junk dealers or scavengers. They combed the area for discarded tin, rags, paper, bones, and other items thrown away. Some developed a side line collecting herbs, furs, hides, feathers, and other items that had resale value. At times they enlisted their female customers to help them out with the collecting and engaged in a kind of barter with them. The women provided them with these items and the peddler gave them merchandise in exchange. This operation allowed the immigrant peddlers to serve as suppliers to manufacturers. Everything they collected had some economic value for someone and the peddlers played a crucial role in those operations. Many a former peddler, in fact, went into the scrap business, buying up whatever the peddlers had collected while on their routes, again replicating a familiar European experience for Jewish peddlers. Other former peddlers developed manufacturing businesses in fields like leather goods, a natural outgrowth of their peddling experiences. The peddlers relied in this collecting on their customers. This reliance points to yet another characteristic of German Jewish immigrant peddling in the United States. While peddlers in their memoirs and other kinds of autobiographical writings complained bitterly about the weather, the tedium of life on the road, and the sheer exhaustion they felt after hours carrying their burdensome packs, they nearly never complained about hostile treatment on the part of the customers. While not all former peddlers waxed eloquent about the warmth and amity which flourished between them and the customers, some did, and most acknowledged that the people into whose homes they went, greeted them with hospitality, reflecting no doubt the desire for companionship of women and men who lived some distance from neighbors and who had little contact with the outside world. The peddlers had ample opportunity to get to know their customers, probably more than most merchants did. Because of the weekly cycle of the peddlers’ selling operation, the peddlers faced the imminent issue of what to do at the end of the day, where to eat and where to sleep. At times they had no choice and had to fend for themselves, eating the food that they had packed up during their weekend sojourn in the town or city where they had gotten their goods. In worst case scenarios, they slept in fields and forests or in their wagons filled with the goods they carried. But in the ideal they slept and ate in their customers’ homes. They tried to plan their routes so that the last customer of the day would be the nicest, most hospitable, most likely to offer them a bed. They established these routes and established relationships with particular customers. The peddlers often knew exactly at whose home they would sleep, on which day. The Peddling Profession and Integration into American Society This fact of life for peddlers revealed much about the integrative effect of the occupation. Because they spent time in the intimacy of their customers’ homes they had to chat with them to fill up the time. They provided news from the big cities and from other communities. They talked about the weather and at times, the subject of their conversations turned to religion. This topic logically flowed from the fact that many of the peddlers politely refused to eat some or all of the food that the customers offered them. Jewish dietary law, kashrut, forbade them from eating the meat or, in fact, most of what the customers ate. When asked why they could not eat the food, the peddlers openly admitted that religious law dictated that they could not. Housewives tried to prepare the kind of food the peddler could eat, such as eggs in their shells and fruit and vegetables. Some memoirs describe how the peddler would leave a pot in the customer’s home so he could fix his own food. All of these encounters between peddlers and householders over food then led to questions about Jews and Judaism. Customers asked questions about the Jewish religion. Some peddlers in their memoirs recalled that customers, almost always the Protestant ones, invited them to participate with the family in Bible reading, something that would likely never have happened in Europe. So too customers recollected in their writings the spectacle of seeing the Jewish peddler praying in the morning, replete with his prayer shawl, his tallit, and with the tefillin, the leather boxes held in place with straps which Jewish men affix to their foreheads and forearms for morning prayers. Most of these customers had never encountered Jews before, let alone Jews in prayer, and the fact of the peddlers’ presence helped erase the distance between the two faith traditions. Notably peddlers in their memoirs, diaries, and autobiographical fragments have nearly nothing to say about hostility towards them as Jews. At a time of intense Christian evangelical activity in the United States, when organizations like the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of the Jews employed missionaries to work to bring about the conversion of the Jews, few memoirs of German Jewish peddlers ever mention customers trying to win them over. The absence of such references indicates the degree to which these peddlers helped, by sheer dint of their presence in their customers’ homes, to erase some elements of the religious friction that existed between Jews and Christians. Among those men and women to whom the peddlers sold and into whose homes they went, a kind of mutual respect seems to have flourished. The customers seemed to have genuinely respected the Jews’ religion, catering to their dietary needs as best they could and seeking to hear what they had to say about the Bible and other religious matters. The closest relationships developed between the peddlers and their female customers. The peddlers arrived when husbands had left for work or for the fields while the women remained in the home space. The peddlers also carried goods that tended to fall into the women’s zone. For one, they carried jewelry, hair combs, ribbons, lace, and other female accoutrements. They also sold home furnishings, again something that fell under women’s jurisdiction. In the particular cultural regime of nineteenth century America, men would not have bothered with these kinds of items. Women in and around small towns also appreciated the peddlers because of the fact that buying from them released women from having to go to town, to the local store. General stores in many small communities tended to be male preserves. Men sat around the pot-bellied stove in the store. They spat, smoked, told stories that the women, thoroughly inculcated into the nineteenth century’s cult of true womanhood, found offensive. They had to endure the stares, whistles, and cat-calls of the men who gathered in the store. For African-American women after the Civil War, the peddler provided an alternative to having to enter through the back door of the store, the rude treatment, and the exorbitant interest charged to black customers. When the peddler came to their homes they could handle the goods and try on the clothes, something taboo in the shops in town. While humorous articles appeared in newspapers and magazines which poked fun of the peddlers and suggested that the peddlers used their charms to seduce the women to whom they sold, few incidents ever happened in which someone accused the peddlers of sexual misconduct. Rather, romance and marriage between German Jewish peddlers and the American Christian women to whom they sold did take place. Probably the most famous of these involved Marcus Spiegel, an immigrant peddler from Bavaria who peddled in the 1850s in Ohio. Along his route he met Caroline Hamlin, a young woman from a well-off Quaker family. The two met over the course of Spiegel’s various peddling forays into her home and they fell in love. Notably the Hamlin family, a solid respectable family with deep and long roots in America, did not object to the marriage of their daughter to a German immigrant man, a Jewish peddler, while his Bavarian Jewish family who lived in Chicago did find the marriage problematic, as it crossed the religious boundary. Marcus and Caroline married in a civil ceremony in Ohio in 1853 and later the couple moved back to Chicago where Caroline converted to Judaism. Before moving to Chicago, they had settled in Ohio where he opened a store, and actively participated in local politics and civic affairs in a small community with nearly no Jews.[3] This story happens to have been well documented in as much as Marcus eventually served in the United States army during the Civil War and Caroline kept his letters, which their descendants eventually published. The story of their meeting, courtship, marriage, and lives together until his untimely death during the war, however, were echoed by others from other regions. All of them bore witness to the possibilities open to Jewish immigrant peddlers in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Business of Peddling: Jewish Networks in America Jewish peddlers went in and out of towns and cities, often traveling by waterways to get to their weekly routes. Their entrepreneurial activities took much of their shape from the presence of Jewish communities in those towns and cities. The Jews in those places primarily owned retail stores of some kind or another, or dealt in wholesale goods, providing the peddlers with the items which they would sell directly in the customers’ homes. Often the settled merchants had some family relationship to the new peddler. They might be brothers, brothers-in-law, uncles, or cousins who had come to the United States first. Sometimes the Jewish shopkeeper came from the same village in Bavaria or Baden or some other German province and the peddler had come specifically seeking out these familiar individuals. These shopkeepers and wholesalers did more than just outfit the peddlers. Usually former peddlers themselves, they instructed the neophyte peddlers how to ply their trade, what to say, what to charge. Since the immigrant peddler knew little English, the former peddlers would write out in Hebrew characters, transliterated into English, such phrases as “Good morning, madam,” and “Would you like to look in my bag.” They helped the newcomer peddlers secure licenses, which nearly all jurisdictions required, and bonded them—again something mandated by state law. The storeowners and other suppliers of the peddlers also showed the peddlers where to go, what route to follow. This last point had deep historic roots and also a very practical reason for its existence. Jews had peddled for centuries in Europe and in the Muslim worlds. Communal convention, buttressed by Jewish law, dictated that each peddler have his ownmedinah, literally his state or kingdom. In this context it meant that each peddler had his own selling territory and that no peddler should infringe on another’s. Since many peddlers got their goods from the same supplier, the suppliers did not want them to compete against each other and thereby lessen his profits. Rather, they encouraged each peddler to set out on his own path, maximizing the number of customers who would buy goods from the same single source. The Jewish shopkeeper in small towns or in larger cities in America, regardless of region, sent his peddlers out to their own specific territories. All of them then returned at the end of the work week and paid the supplier for the goods, plus his profit. The peddlers kept a share for themselves as their earnings from the week’s drudgery on the road. Jewish peddlers shifted from one locale to another. As they heard that new regions had opened up they left the places where they had sold and tried out new ones. Jewish immigrants who had a difficult time getting started in some sedentary business in a large city or unhappy with their lot as clerks, garment workers, or employees of someone else, decided to try their hand at peddling. They saw it as the surest route to self-employment and eventual success. It required very little capital, indeed none, other than the startup loan for goods, and Jewish tradition mandated that Jews give each other interest-free loans as a way to launch their business enterprises. Even if observed in the breach, the one who made the loan in the form of goods, the shopkeeper, had much to gain by getting the peddler started as the latter served as his feet into the hinterlands. While Jews had peddled for centuries and in the German-speaking regions in particular, peddling in America differed. In central Europe, made up of a patch-work of small jurisdictions, peddlers had to have licenses or patents for every place they went. They labored under various restrictions as Jews and as peddlers as to what they could carry, when they could sell, and how much they could charge. In America with its relatively lax state mechanism, a simple state license sufficed and much of the time, state authorities did not enforce the license laws. Many German Jewish immigrants decided on peddling because they saw it as a way to get started in the new land to which they had migrated. It worked well for the demographics of the migration. In the main, the Jewish immigrants, excluding those from Posen, tended to be young single men. They had left towns and villages where they saw few opportunities for making a living and while some of their siblings stayed in Germany but moved to the economically more dynamic larger cities, those who went to America saw few options for themselves if they remained at home. Many of them labored under the hardships of the matrikel, a system in some German regions that limited the number of Jews who could get married. Thus these young Jewish bachelors opted for America, and for the life of peddling, so that they could eventually settle down, get married, and start families. The migration tended to follow the classic patterns of a chain migration. In any given family one son went first, with or without some friends—peers who found themselves in the same limited straits. They made their way to the United States, joining townspeople or relatives already settled in some specific place. Those who had preceded the new immigrants might still be involved in peddling and they introduced the newest arrival to their suppliers, Jewish merchants always eager to extend the scope of their selling operation and as such usually willing to take on additional peddlers. If the townspeople or kin already in America had moved beyond the peddling stage and had become shopkeepers—the nearly universal pattern—then the recent arrivals fresh off the boat from the ports of Hamburg, Bremen, or Rotterdam could serve as their peddlers. Either way, a symbiotic relationship flourished between the peddlers and the Jewish shopkeepers and that symbiosis gave shape to the migration. The symbiosis between the Jewish peddlers and the settled Jewish shopkeepers transcended the world of business, although that certainly lay at the heart of their interactions. When peddlers found themselves in distress, sick with no family of their own to care for them, the local Jewish community sprang into action. Particularly active in providing this kind of assistance were the Jewish women, organized into Female Hebrew Benevolent Associations. Many Jewish enclaves, the smaller ones in particular which had no formal institutions of Jewish life, moved out of the informal stage when a peddler died on the road. Someone had to provide for him a proper Jewish burial and thus in many communities the death of a peddler spurred Jews on, for the first time, to organize into a duly constituted group so that they could buy a piece of land to use as a cemetery. The fact that members of the settled Jewish enclave provided services to the peddlers at moments of distress points to the rigors of peddling. Exposed to the elements, carrying heavy bags on their backs, estimated by some observers to weigh over one hundred pounds, and having to walk along muddy roads, peddlers had to have tremendous physical stamina to survive in the occupation. They had to be willing to endure short term misery in order to fulfill the goals of the migration, which in large measure meant giving up their lives of peddling. Abraham Kohn came to the United States from Bavaria in the 1850s and left one of the best personal peddler accounts. He started out in New York City, hoping to avoid peddling and make it as a clerk. Having failed at that he lamented, that he found himself, “as all others; with a bundle on my back I had to go out into the country.” Kohn peddled in western Massachusetts and had little encouraging to record in his diary about the snow, the unfriendly customers, and what he saw as the shamefulness of his existence. He found the experience difficult and miserable and he filled his diary with anguished rhetoric. “This, then,” he wrote, “is the vaunted luck of the immigrant from Bavaria!” Presuming someone still back home might read this, he went on addressing, “O misguided fools, led astray by avarice and cupidity!” as he counseled them to stay home.[4] German Jewish peddlers not only hated the physical conditions dictated by climate and topography, but some found themselves the victims of crime. As men on the road with cash and valuables they must have been particularly attractive targets for bandits. In a relatively lawless society as America was in the nineteenth century, the peddlers, who rarely carried weapons, could not expect that the state would protect them. The details of murders of Jewish immigrant peddlers in the Jewish and general press further demonstrated the difficulties of the lives they faced. Newspapers told of their violent deaths and the papers consistently labeled the victim a “Jewish peddler” or a “Jew peddler,” and detailed the fact of his having been German. These men met their unfortunate fates, though, not because of their Jewishness or their immigrant status. Rather they had fallen victim to the lack of law and order on the roads. That may however have provided little solace to the individual German Jewish immigrant men who set out on their way, trying to earn a living by their itinerant selling. From their perspective, the possibility of physical attack, the unpleasantness of inclement weather, and loneliness of life on the road all added up to a burden made palatable by the thought that through peddling they could achieve the goal, namely, to earn enough money and bring to an end their peddling years. Life After Peddling Most peddlers got their wish. Almost without exception, they peddled only short periods of time and then settled down. This made peddling in America different than it had been back home, where many peddlers faced a lifetime of selling from packs on their backs. In the United States peddling functioned as a transitional stage in the immigrant Jews’ lives, between their arrival and their achieving ultimate stability. The peddlers lived thrifty lives, saving every bit they could. Since they had no overhead they seemed to have done well enough that in relatively short periods of time, a few months or a few years, they had put away enough money to be able to send the fare for the passage of brothers, sometimes one after the other. These bands of brothers tended again to cluster around peddling out of the same towns, getting their goods from the same suppliers. They pooled their savings as they expected eventually to open a single store. Typically peddlers remained unmarried as long as they had to sell from the road. Later generations of Jewish peddlers, those from Eastern Europe including from Posen and from Lithuania, were likely to be married and these men either left their wives and children in Europe or reunited with them on a weekly basis as they had their two days off the road. Those peddlers had a much more sluggish rate of economic mobility. The money they saved from their peddling expeditions had to go to the upkeep of wives and children, retarding the pace of moving up and out of peddling. But the majority of the German Jewish immigrant peddlers migrated as single men. They married only when they decided that they could afford to step off the road and open a store. They did this for a number of reasons. Certainly they wanted to live comfortably and marrying too hastily, starting a family too soon would make that impossible. After all, they had left their homes in Germany to achieve a level of economic comfort and did not want to do anything to jeopardize the prospect of improving their lives now that they were in America. So they waited for the right moment to take this momentous step. When they decided that the time had come to get married they developed various strategies which reflected the reality that few single women had made the migration on their own from the German- speaking lands. Unlike the subsequent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who would arrive later in the century, young Jewish women from the German states rarely emigrated independently in order to work. This reflected in part the nature of the American economy in the mid-nineteenth century when few jobs existed for single women, and Jewish women eschewed those that did, like domestic service. Later the vast expansion of the garment industry would provide jobs for millions of single women. But in the years of the great migration from central Europe, Jewish young women migrated only to join family, which usually meant brothers and usually their migrations tended to be in relationship to marriage prospects in America. These immigrating young Jewish women provided many of the brides for the Jewish peddlers, just ready to get off the road. Others of the peddlers turned to the Jews in the communities where they got their goods and where they spent their weekend time. Local Jewish shopkeepers had daughters, nieces, and other relatives who often became the brides for the peddlers ready to settle down. These matrimonial ties further solidified the connections between Jews in any place and between the business and communal realm. Memoirs and other such documents tell this story. Abraham Flexner recalled the details of his mother’s life. She and her sister had come to Louisville, Kentucky from the Rhineland to live with an uncle who operated a wholesale china concern. As she told her son, at the uncle’s house she and her sister “met many of the young Jewish merchants or peddlers, who used to spend the Jewish holidays and weekends in the large city.” Both women found their partners among them.[5] As peddlers went in and out of particular communities, they found Jewish women of marriageable ages. One Jewish peddler from Bavaria who used Milwaukee, Wisconsin as his base of operation boarded there with a particular Jewish family. When he had saved up enough money and wanted to open his own store, he married the daughter of the household where he had stayed. Together the two went out to Monroe, Wisconsin to begin their married lives together. Yet another case provides a portrait of the ways peddlers located brides and the links between marriage and business. Samuel Rosenwald, also from Bavaria, peddled out of Baltimore. He got his goods from a supplier firm owned by the Hammerslough brothers, themselves also Bavarians. The Hammerslough brothers had one sister and when Samuel Rosenwald had finished his years peddling along Virginia’s Winchester Trail, he married her. As a wedding gift the suppliers gave them a store to manage in Peoria, Illinois. Samuel Rosenwald eventually owned a men’s clothing store in Springfield, Illinois and his son, Julius, became one of America’s wealthiest businessmen and one of its most generous philanthropists.[6] Others of the German Jewish immigrants tried a different strategy for finding a wife. Some went back to their home communities in Bavaria or the Rhineland and found suitable young women. These journeys obviously provided an opportunity for the emigrant to see his parents again, to reconnect with his birthplace, but they also had the practical aspect of using this opportunity to search for a wife. The availability of large numbers of single Jewish women in the German small towns reflected the reality of the migration. The Jewish communities particularly in the small towns of the German states became increasingly feminized, and growing numbers of women faced the reality that they had few prospects for marriage. A returned townsman, having spent some time peddling in America, could be a particularly attractive mate, no matter the circumstances, but certainly for young women with few marriage prospects at home. The now married former peddlers had a singular history in the United States. As a whole they tended to be quite successful in their subsequent business activities. Most settled down to comfortable lives as merchants, whether retail or wholesale, in both large cities and small towns spread across the American continent. Some of them became fabulously wealthy and emerged as the exemplars of America’s nineteenth century “rags-to-riches” narrative. The names Guggenheim, Lehman, Seligman, and Straus(s), including both the Straus family associated with Macy’s department store, and that of Levi Strauss, whose denim pants have persisted into the twenty-first century, stood at the apex of the peddler success route. In nearly every American city, local department stores owed the origins to a Jewish peddler. Adam Gimbel, for example, left the Rhineland as an eighteen year old with no money and started out peddling in Indiana, in the area around Vincennes. He opened his first department store in Milwaukee in 1887. He and his sons then opened others around the country, in 1894 in Philadelphia and 1910 in New York. The latter store competed with Macy’s, owned by Lazarus Straus and his sons. Straus also owned the fashionable emporium of Abraham & Straus, another New York retail landmark. Department stores around the country grew out of the peddling activities of German Jewish immigrants. While only a small number of German Jewish immigrant peddlers went on to own major department stores, an even more miniscule handful became upper echelon financiers, shapers of the economic fortune of the nation. But Mayer Lehman andJoseph Seligman both from Bavaria did just that, emerging after the Civil War as some of the wealthiest Americans whose financial operations reverberated around the world. Both of them began as peddlers. The Gimbels and the Seligmans represent exceptions to the general pattern of the post-peddling experiences of German Jewish immigrants. Most became modestly successful. They experienced economic mobility, moving from their initial small stores to larger ones. Often their former customers patronized their shops, since the peddlers had established mutually positive relationships with the customers who sought to continue the relationship. The peddlers who settled down became respected members of local communities, participating in civic affairs as office-holders and as participants in community undertakings. Many joined the Masons, the Odd Fellows, and other non-denominational male lodges. They projected themselves as pillars of civic virtue and expressed deep commitment to the places they lived and to the nation as a whole. After all, those communities and the United States had been very good to them and allowed them as relatively poor young immigrant men to attain a level of integration and economic well-being that they could not have imagined. The former peddlers, those who had emigrated from Germany to the United States, did not compromise on their Jewish commitments as they integrated themselves in America. They founded, joined, and sustained all kinds of Jewish organizations and projects which constituted the backbone of Jewish life in America. They made up the membership of B’nai B’rith lodges across the countries and they participated and led every kind of Jewish charitable project that came into being over the course of the last half of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Whether the Jewish charity—hospital, orphanage, training school, or the like—took shape on the local level or on the national or international stages, the former peddlers, with their financial help and organizational involvements, played a crucial role in the shaping of modern Jewish history. Rightly the American Jews of German birth, those who came to the United States as peddlers, have been associated with the rise and institutional development of the Reform movement in American Judaism. While the first stirrings of the reform of Judaism surfaced first in Germany, in places like Berlin and Hamburg, little evidence exists that the German Jews in the United States, the peddlers and their families, took those efforts as their inspiration. Rather American conditions and the legacies of peddling helped nudge them towards reform. The peddlers who had made their way around the United States, interacted with their Christian customers, and considered the kind of boundaries inherent in normative Judaism, which separated Jew from non-Jew, to not fit their new American selves. On their forays into the American countryside, whether as peddlers by foot or by wagon, they witnessed the exuberant creation of new denominations within American Protestantism. They saw how religious pluralism defined America as women and men of different iterations of Protestantism by and large co-existed with each other and churches stood side by side, not as affronts to each other but in harmony. While anti-Catholicism flourished in mid-nineteenth century America, creating, in fact, the most potent third-party in its history, the Know Nothings, Judaism inspired no mass political or cultural backlash. As most of the Jewish immigrants to America saw it, individuals within a faith community could disagree among themselves as to what the tradition demanded of them and what it allowed them to do. Those differences did not have to constitute irreconcilable points of contestation. Why, essentially they asked, could Judaism not accommodate a similar kind of diversity? Certainly their years on the road, the fact that peddlers lodged with Christian customers, ate at their tables, and sometimes could not observe their daily prayers, loosened their sense of obligation to normative Judaism. But that did not mean that their years peddling or their positive interactions with their Christian customers loosened their obligation to Judaism and Jewish life. Everywhere the peddlers settled down, when they did so in large enough number, they helped consecrate cemeteries, found congregations, build synagogues, and make possible the development of Jewish institutional life. They served in leadership capacities in local, national, and even international Jewish affairs, and donated huge sums of money to the advancement of Judaism and the support of the Jewish people. But in the places they settled, most of the former peddlers of the German migration era felt empowered to modify traditional practice. The idea of the reform of Judaism appealed to them. In city after city, former peddlers, now solid and comfortable businessmen, helped lead their congregations into the reform camp. When the movement coalesced around the efforts of Isaac Mayer Wise, who came to the United States from Bohemia, the erstwhile peddlers in places like Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere helped facilitate his efforts to create the institutional apparatus of the movement. Former peddlers, for example, played the key roles in the creation of Chicago’s first Reform congregation, Temple Sinai.[7] In other places and other institutional settings, former peddlers helped steer once traditional congregations towards reform. Peddling helped launch the Jewish migration out of Germany and its predecessor states. The knowledge that thousands of young single men could come to America and get on the road, laden with a jumble of goods on their backs, and reasonably hope to end up a married proprietor of a thriving business, propelled them. It made the years of discomfort and loneliness on the road worthwhile to them. It also made it worthwhile to the customers they served, who found the services of the peddlers something which enhanced the material conditions of their lives. In that way peddlers left their mark on the United States. The fact that they could fulfill the aims of their migration, settle down, and succeed in business, also helped change the face of the Jewish world for decades to come. EBAY3550Condition:Used, Condition:Very good condition. ( Pls look at scan for accurate AS IS images ), Country/Region of Manufacture:Israel, Country of Manufacture:Israel